Ace Combat Evangelion: Aces' Heritage
by Phnx28
Summary: What if the Evangelion characters have other lives out there in the endless parallel universes, some as frighteningly similar as they are radically different? Say, in the Ace Combat universe, for example? C&C Welcome. UPDATED
1. Alpha from out of Omega

Ace Combat Evangelion: Aces' Heritage 

Summary: During Third Impact, Shinji briefly experienced a completely alternate life: one far less hopeless and alienating than his technically "real" one, and equally real besides. Hence, what if there was also a third major alternate life for the Evangelion characters among countless others out there in the endless parallel universes: one as eerily similar to their default existence as it is also radically different.

Ratings and Warnings: R/M for violence in general, war in particular, angst, cussing, lime-grade sexual situations, and the sake of healthy caution. Be prepared for AU, CI, and POV elements ahead. Standard disclaimers apply since I do not own _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ (GAINAX), _Ace Combat_ (Bandai/Namco) or any other franchise referenced; nor shall I profit from this story in any way, save possibly catharsis.

General A/N: Standard Pairings apply (Shinji/Asuka, Misato/Kaji &c.), with the possible exceptions of Nagase/Genette, Rei/Kaworu and Kensuke/Mana. The Ace Combat universe is the setting, so the Evangelion characters' lives are accordingly AU. However, I chose the Ace universe for this story because it has certain coincidences with the Evangelion timeline that should keep the OOC potential to a minimum. Careful comments and critique would be most helpful and appreciated because of these issues. This is also technically a springboard to several other Eva crossovers I'll (eventually) turn to, but can be read as a stand-alone story if so desired.

Chapter A/N: Mostly based on the original Episodes 25-26 of _Evangelion_, but references are made to specific parts of _End of Evangelion _for dramatic effect. Since my preliminary opinion after watching the series is that Shinji followed two different particular endings to the same general end: rejection of Instrumentality, certain (few) fundamental events (e.g. Rei/Lilith fusion) can be seen as occurring in both TV and movie versions. Readers do not have to agree with this judgment, but it informs the plot of this story nonetheless, so let the reader beware. This entire chapter occurs within the world the subjects imagined while undergoing Third Impact, now a subtle and vicious hell in which only the form of a folding chair and an LCL colored spotlight from nowhere exist.

Chapter 1: Alpha from out of Omega

It was finished. And therefore, in theory, so was she. The young man she had desired to be her friend, family and… more… had finally accepted himself. He'd lived the life of another self who was an equal reflection of him, and thus came to know his own truth. In so doing, this unlikely legend of a boy cast away a lifetime's worth of self-loathing and rose up to seize a way out of the final prison that was Third Impact for all, wielding as both banner and weapon the sheer power Rei had (inadvertently) given him to _choose _to live on as himself; not as a disembodied soul suspended within a planetary ocean of LCL or merged into some interstellar demigoddess. Oh yes, Rei showed Shinji a way out of Third Impact for all, but one she was unsure she possessed strength of spirit to travel; which is why she ambled blankly on across the void even as she continued to marvel at his triumph from the realm of death.

"They are returning now; all but those who choose remain complemented in a state of eternal rest. But where am I to go now that my purpose… my final incarnation… has ended in abject failure and brutal death. I am Shinji's 'necessary loss,' the price for his victory which I too hold splendid in my sight; but still, I wish I were not so…" The lost soul clinging pragmatically to the obsolete name Rei Ayanami saw no evident path she could travel to follow Shinji back, nor any suitable remnant soul to remain complemented unto even if that choice meant surrendering to a contrived heaven spun from the brass thread of her basest fantasies; a consummation devoutly to be wished, perhaps, considering the alternative she was still trapped in.

Sensing no options, for she had to do _something _or face gradual absorption into the abyss in this realm of nothingness, Rei moved towards her one remaining lodestar in a last bid for liberation. And she felt, vaguely off in the immeasurable distance, that "Space of Absolute Freedom" that she among others had helped Shinji navigate, the (mis) step that had begun her coming to this point.

She felt this space, of course, but soon realized had neither the bearings to reorient her back home even if she traveled it, nor the wherewithal to survive the process if she did. Yes, Rei regarded, this was like so much else in her life: a forlorn and wasted hope. Sighing, she took the time to return to the same chair she'd left before, the one imagined during complementation, and arranged her imaginary skirts while seeking at least a modicum of dignity before she surrendered to the nothingness around and within. "Curse you… Commander Ikari… _Father…(!)_ Because you used me instead of loving me, just like everyone else in your life, I am indeed forsaken… _I am utterly forsaken…(!)_"

Just as Rei's whimper of dereliction echoed across the void in this place of neither space nor time, but only of mind, a smart-alecky voice from the darkness begged to differ with her. "No! No! No! No! NO! Do NOT give up on yourself just because your asshole dad had some _major _grief and coping skill issues. If you do that, then those who hurt you every chance they got will have won; and I _know _Shinji didn't politely deny the Reaper to his face just to walk off and leave you hanging in this two-bit hell, no damned way!"

Rei was as much startled as slightly heartened by this stranger's impassioned rallying cry, and she just dared to inquire to the void in that eerie pseudo-monotone her voice took on when asking a profound question. "Who are you? What are you doing in this place? I do not remember feeling your body and mind complement onto my own or vice versa during the Instrumentality, but you are welcome to do so if you choose." Rei tenuously prepared to drop the faded remnants of her AT Field and join with this stranger should he agree to mutually terminate their separate existences.

"Uh… that's real nice of you and all, but I'd rather pass if you don't mind. Sure, seeing both sides of the coin by melting it down and sticking your head in the slag _is _a path to salvation/enlightenment/rapture/whatever, but first you've got to survive the ultimate 'bad trip' to get there. I do know some who might go for it though…" The voice pondered as it searched its own memories. "Yes, Major Hamilton! That whole 'rebirth through death' thing is just the kind of nihilistic scheme for salvation his vibes _screamed _about wanting to try sometime!"

Rei was becoming irritated, but remained too shaken by her misfortune to show it outside her phrasing. "Excuse me, but although your commentary is… interesting… you have not answered me at all. Perhaps you should reveal the form of your mind so I may know who is speaking up for me?"

"NO problem, little lady! Whew…" The voice sighed in relief. "I was beginning to worry you'd never ask and just banish me or something."

With that, a tall, yet puckish and dapper looking man in what was clearly a flight suit appeared before Rei as if some existential spotlight had simply conjured him into being; which in point of fact, it had, and precisely where Commander Ikari had stood while Rei had recalled his picking her up to go and begin the Instrumentality. The stranger promptly moved to shake her hand at first as she stood, but then recalled his first meeting both Nagase and Blaze back in training, and pulled back to bow instead. He introduced himself, smartly saluting but languidly intoning, indicative of his distaste for protocol, as "Lieutenant Colonel (posthumous) Alvin H. Davenport, Serial Number… ah screw it, Killed in Action; Osean Air Defense Force 108th Tactical Fighter Squadron 'Wardog', Sand Island Detachment; callsign 'Wardog 3,' but that's 'Chopper' to you, miss; my tactical handle is _way _cooler than the one AWACS Thunder-_block_-head keeps calling me." Chopper smirked in silent laughter at his insult to a superior officer entire dimensions away from where he stood (?) now, i.e. the ideal place for such insubordination if one wishes to escape summary punishment and/or a general courts martial.

"Greetings, Lieutenant Colonel Davenport; I am Rei Ayanami, the First Child selected by the Marduk Report and designated pilot of the General Purpose Decisive Battle Weapon (Android) Evangelion Unit 00. I regret your fall in the line of duty, a fate you unfortunately share with one of this being's prior host bodies, and thus with myself as well. My humblest condolences as a fellow combat pilot…" Rei bowed even deeper than she had to start with in a gesture of respect both due, and felt for, the warrior she saw before her. Standing again, hands clasped before her waist formally, Rei continued "Forgive me, but I have many questions, since I am familiar with neither the country nor armed forces of Osea; and I do not understand why or how you are here exactly. Were you unable to complement onto other variations of yourself in parallel worlds more similar to your own?"

Chopper pulled up a chair identical to Rei's from the nothingness around, and slouched down next to her as he began. "Well… kind of. You see, I'd loitered around versions of _your _particular Earth, weirdo alternate geography compared to mine notwithstanding, ever since accepting my death; and I wanted to try out another me first before starting any full-on reincarnations. As a matter of fact, I'd picked a version of me that joined this badass secret organization and was perfecting a _wicked cool _giant robot. But then some bizarre… _thing… _happened and that particular me got cut off from any reality at all, parallel or otherwise! Figuring to myself, 'What the hell! Bummer, man…' my soul went back to body-shopping for a while until somebody decided they just _had _to go and attempt an Instrumentality; one loud enough to be heard three whole first-order parallel-universes away too!" Chopper signaled his exasperation at Third Impact; clearly its 'psychic boom,' as it were, had seriously startled and disturbed him.

"I see," Rei murmured. "You felt from afar the confusion and pain that many of my world's souls experienced during Third Impact. I did not wish that particular aspect to be so, but it was part of the chosen process and unavoidable. In any case, they may resume their prior forms now that Instrumentality has failed; and are doing so as we speak, thanks to Shinji's example." Rei began to shudder as she contemplated Shinji's triumph, and its equal corollary. "If only I could… do so as… well…" Rei's downcast glance resumed, betraying more than her few tears and imperceptible sobs did.

"Yeah, and you might want to consider _asking _the people you want to squish together into one 'superbeing' if it's okay before off and doing it next time! I don't know much, but I _do _recall that any soul who's wandered this particular 'Twilight Zone' long enough knows that Instrumentality events aren't to be thrown casually like so many birthday parties. It's bad luck and all, you know…" His flippant lecture concluding, Chopper remembered Rei's distress and relented of his monologue. "Aww… come on Rei. What's there to cry about? You heard about it; 'they can all return' right? What the woman, who looks _way _too much like you for comfort now that I think about it, said? Well so can you!"

"_No._" Rei's deathlike tone indicated her frustration with Chopper was reaching the breaking point, a phenomenon she only recalled twice before in her existence, both of those incidents revolving around Shinji in their own ways. "No, Chopper, it is not so. _They _can all return, but I seem unable to follow them back. I believe it is due to my role as instigator of the Instrumentality, as well as my… nature… more broadly speaking." Rei tiptoed around the reason precisely why she looked so much like the late Yui Ikari with her typical reserve, since she had no illusions about just how abhorrent most people found the very idea of human cloning, as both of the Akagi women had made excruciatingly clear to her.

"Oh no, Rei… Do NOT go there! I saw all that in the backwash from your Instrumentality when it hit me. So what if you're a clone! You have to have a soul to even _be _here, so that shoots down most people's first mistaken idea about clones right in the merge, as we fighter jocks like to say. The fact that your creator barred more than one of you at a time from accessing that soul by spiking the others' LCL tank with selectively mind inhibiting drugs, profoundly disturbing though it is, has no bearing on that soul's legitimacy or otherwise. That's just _one _damned lie both the late Doctors Akagi told you that you've been repeating to yourself, and one of the only things keeping you here to boot!"

Rei opened her mouth in a muted gasp of surprise. She thought, _"Could it really be that simple? Might the same truth I revealed to Shinji apply equally to myself?"_ She still didn't dare to hope so yet, and queried Chopper for his honest opinion. "If my being is not false, then… what am I to you Chopper?"

"Beautiful, Rei. That's the long and short of it. And I know from experience too; even if I still can't quite decide if you're Shinji's bizarrely young aunt or some strange sort of twin sister instead; not that it's my place to of course!" Chopper quickly adopted his standard sheepish manner as he distanced himself from that particular and persistent can of worms. He'd made his point though, and that was all that mattered. The rest was smooth sailing from now on. "But don't take my word for it, obliged though I might be if you did. Why not take a look for yourself to see why."

"How?" Rei was intrigued now, equally indicated by her deceptively slight smile as her simple joy at having the sincere respect of someone _other _than Shinji, for once.

"See that door over yonder?" Chopper waved broadly to his right side as an innocuous doorframe suspiciously like the one to Rei's former apartment in New Tokyo-3 appeared out of the blackness at his speaking of it. "I think that's what you were looking for before I showed up. Just think of me as you step in and you'll get to check out _my _world for a change."

Rei decided after a short beat of consideration. "Very well. Thank you, Chopper; inadequately as that expression may fit this one's gratitude for your… perspective." She bowed her deepest yet in thanks, an emotion itself expressed by Rei only once prior, before she opened the door and stepped through into an endless expanse of white.

That "Space of Absolute Freedom," the equal and yet opposite of the nothingness she had languished in prior, consumed her as she floated on. "What is this? I am nearing it… Yes… It is upon me…(!)" Rei fell into a being equal parts a stranger and at once intimately familiar with a jarring psychic crash of two minds merging upon impact before jolting awake as one.


	2. A Spirit

Ace Combat Evangelion: Aces' Heritage Chapter 2: A Spirit… 

Chapter A/N: Takes place during Ace Combat 5's mission #17: "Journey Home," but is best visualized as a side-story cut scene, detailing an inserted character's view of that AC5 mission's events as I typically play them. I've named the 'family friend,' whom Gendo only half-lied about (strictly IMHO) when claiming Rei's parentage during _Evangelion _episode 21, as Yuko Ayanami. The particular _Yu_ kanji I have in mind for her name's formal spelling matches with a different _Rei _character from the numeral kanji used in Rei's formal name to spell _"Yurei," _or "Ghost" in Japanese. My interpretation of Anea as the AC world's substitute for Japan is entirely non-canon, and may be revised at any time if a true equivalent is later revealed in an Ace Combat game or official supplement. This is also somewhat of a POV story as well, even if written in the standard third-person perspective. WARNINGS: Serious Angst, some abusive language and actions, military violence all ahead. All disclaimers apply, especially to the song _The Journey Home_.

Time: 17:00hrs 11/29/2010. Location: November International Stadium, November City, Osean Federation on the Osea Continent….

"The setting sun, the end of another day…" Rei Ayanami, an Osean foster child of ethnic Anean origin looked up to the evening sky and thought of her world as she saw it. It was comfortable; but so much felt wrong with it, for so many reasons that she could scarcely understand much less articulate at her tender (apparent) age of nine. But she understood one of the reasons it felt so wrong perfectly as she concluded: "I wish it would end this war as well."

Rei was only living in Osea, if indeed anywhere at all, because of a wartime decision her vanished mother had made when Rei was barely even a toddler. The late Yuko Ayanami swore unto death that her darling Rei would escape the Erusean state security operatives already hunting them both that stormy spring morning in 2005, even if the woman Rei only remembered now as a kindly, sad blur in her deepest memories could not. And so, Mrs. Ayanami brought the (purportedly) four-year-old Rei to a contact at the International Children's Charity Foundation branch orphanage in the picturesque city-state of San Salvación, departing from her little ghost's life with a half-remembered kiss goodbye. Before walking but ten steps out the front door, she was pounced upon by some six plainclothes Erusean policemen and peremptorily hustled into a waiting unmarked truck, to simply disappear from life itself as far as the world was concerned, much less Rei's life.

Given that this was at the height of the Usean Continental War and San Salvación had already been under fascist Erusean occupation for two years, ICCF promptly honored Yuko Ayanami's sacrifice in the only way practical. Wasting only what time they could not help, they carefully smuggled Rei and all other refugee children they could out of Erusean territory by any means necessary; and into foster homes in the one free nation powerful enough to simply swat down any unlikely Erusean attempt to visit the parents' sins unto the children: the democratic world superpower known as the Osean Federation.

Six years later, Rei had found a suitable foster home under the attentive if stern watch of the noted computer scientist Dr. Naoko Akagi. But she had not found peace, for another cruel joke had seen fit to write itself into Rei's story unbidden: Osea, once her shelter from War's peril, now found itself at war. Worse, pitted against none other than its old ally, and Anea's even older oppressor: the world's other, socialist superpower: Yuktobania. Reflecting on her bizarre life thus far, endlessly trapped in the crossfire of wars between countries she only notionally grasped, and felt no more than the purely customary respect for in the first place; Rei mentally asked herself, "_What is this curious relationship that exists between War and myself? Why must it always follow me like a lost animal seeking a friend?_"

"Hush, Rei!" Rei's foster mother corrected the blue-haired wisp of a girl for her comments regarding the sunset perhaps more harshly than others might find necessary, were they unaware of Rei's uncanny habit of scaring Naoko breathless at every opportunity. "I'll brook **_no_ **defeatism in my household; and especially not with that tone of voice young lady! This war will end just as soon as we give those damned Yuke commies the thrashing they deserve…"

Naoko's stern patriotism was perhaps justifiable; her biological daughter Ritsuko was already a PhD, MD and officer in the Osean Air Defense Force at Heierlark Air Base in the territory variously called North Osea or South Belka, depending on which local resident one asked. But her particular contempt for the Yuktobanians, and all they stood for besides, simply reflected the traditionalist Imperial Anean ideology Naoko venerated; albeit as no more or less than what she had been taught that a traditional Anean family 'should' believe.

But _her _so-called 'traditional Anean family' was hardly such at all, despite Naoko's dutiful prayers to the household shrine for its patron gods to correct the problem ASAP, especially regarding: Rei Ayanami. Rei wasn't necessarily a _troublesome_ child per se, least of all to guests for whom she was a model of polite conduct; but she certainly was a _troubling_ child to anyone who had cared for her long enough to see just how like a ghost Rei could be _apart _from her appearance. As Naoko contemplated this, she startled herself back to reality as she noticed four arrowhead-like forms approaching from the south at high speed and in textbook diamond-slot formation.

"Look, the air show is starting!" Naoko stood almost to attention, insistently nudging Rei to do the same as she trained her binoculars on the lead aircraft. The four F-14D Super Tomcats comprising this onrushing unit were all decked out in an classic Anean theme: pink Sakura blossoms undulating freely on the wind through metallic purple skies painted on the aircrafts' fuselages, which seemed to perfectly complement the wavy climbs and dives the formation sailed through as it approached the city outskirts.

Rei looked up and instantly gaped in a tiny smile of wonder, a sight rare enough to lift even Naoko's professionally dour spirits, were that woman not equally engrossed with the onrushing combination of aeronautical flair and discipline. Rei's crimson eyes instantly latched onto two of the planes in particular as the formation alternated phased sharp banks or inverted rolls in turn, all while holding course to pass over the stadium: the curious aircraft in the trail position, and the one immediately to what would be its left as well.

With the deafening whine of their turbofans filling the stadium as they passed over, the formation lit their afterburners and sharply went vertical just after passing over the scoreboard screen above and behind Rei's head. Rei gasped in further amazement, something she hadn't thought possible, as the lead and trail fighters pulled further into a seemingly excruciating vertical loop before rolling out in a textbook Immelman to exactly recreate the diamond formation as the wingmen barrel rolled out of their own vertical yo-yo turns, crossing their paths before settling into normal position. This breathtaking finale concluded, all four fighters roared away from the clamor of November International Stadium in triumph. Honestly, Rei couldn't tell if the engines or the applause from the ecstatic crowd were louder, but she knew her foster mother was certainly doing her part for the crowd's cause…

In an instinctive act that her young mind found equal parts natural and foreign to her experience, Rei began to compare the the pilots' flying techniques as they went on and assumed what seemed to be a patrol of some sort—they had after all been armed, which puzzled her. The two Rei had in mind were both casual about their flying, the one ahead to port of the trail aircraft almost recklessly so, but each was already a master pilot in their own way and Rei's breath caught for an instant in awe as she grasped the trailing pilot's style in particular. _"So he is what they call an 'Ace?' And I…I know him…yes. I can surely identify him if I just concentrate…"_ However, the so-called 'guest of honor' at this sublime occasion saw fit to deny Rei the very concentration she so sought.

Vice President Appelrouth made Rei uneasy, though she was ashamed to imagine why that was. In truth, she just sensed such an aura of selfishness about him as he spoke, and it took effort for her to pay the proper attention in spite of her instinct to look away in disgust. His speech to commence the ceremony began. "People of Osea… Please, lend an ear to this broadcast. As your Vice President, I stand before you on behalf of the President of Osea. Listen to your fellow countrymen cheering before me."

Rei drowned the Vice President's words in her own thoughts as she pondered why he was using such stern rhetoric at a peace ceremony. Whatever Appelrouth's reasons, Dr. Akagi was eating it up like she had her now empty popcorn. Perhaps such obedience was simply her way of belonging in this world? Rei envied what Naoko was feeling, but something felt very wrong as she tuned back in to Vice President Appelrouth's words exhorting the people of Osea.

"They are filled with ANGER against Yuktobania and they _swear_ that they will not drop their weapons until Yuktobania has surrendered! Now, I ask you to listen. Listen to their cheers!" Appelrouth recovered from the gyrations he'd made during the "ANGER" part of the speech, and cocked his head back like a living statue as he jabbed his right fist skyward and awaited the applause he obviously felt was due him.

The particular adoptive Osean known as Rei Ayanami, however, was mute in horror as the reason for her unease at Vice President Appelrouth's conduct hit her at once. From the depths of memory, images of a poster glimpsed in childhood, block printed onto both its original cheap parchment and Rei's memory, surfaced; it was a montage of a uniformed Generalissimo, whom Rei assumed was Erusea's dictator back during the Usean War, silhouetted against streaking fighters above and with fist cocked in the exact 'conqueror's pose' her Vice President was assuming now.

She thought, staring skyward at the violet-hulled fighters as they buzzed the November Tower silhouetted in sunset, _"I want feelings like these so badly: to respect others and be respected by them; to call somewhere home. But this way to stimulate those feelings offends my conscience as too… hateful. I do not wish to reject others as they have rejected me. Does this way to belong… this entire situation Fate commands us to obey… feel wrong to you as well?" _Seeing those mighty Super Tomcats flash by impassively, the former trailing aircraft back in his rightful place as commander, pressing onward with their patrol and answering her votive question with their thunder, Rei made her decision to seek comfort within and let the storm pass as she always did.

With a rapt Dr. Akagi none the wiser for standing with the crowd while hanging on the Vice President's every word, Rei stood apart and archly turned her eyes to the purple-hulled fighters streaking across the golden horizon, closing them as she began to hum a tune in almost a whisper which sympathizers in the crowed felt at once defiant and yet hopeful. Onlookers would later compare it to either the song of a mother levelly staring down a firing squad to save her condemned child, or alternately of a sister standing equally firm for a brother in similar straits. Though many argued, and that even among those who favored Rei's effort, which not all did even after the truth about the war came out, none could decide which spirit Rei's melody had carried for sure. More still considered it nigh blasphemous to even try.

It was the tune to a popular song, and an old one to be sure. And invariably memorized by those it had touched, but Rei held it particularly dear for a very basic reason; she could swear she'd heard her both her mother, the lost Yuko Ayanami, and another mysterious woman whose presence felt so comforting like Yuko's had that it still confused Rei even years later, singing this song to her together sometime in the vasty deep of her past before time had even been as far as the infant Rei Ayanami was concerned. She clasped her hands to her chest as if in prayer as she hummed the tune that some fellow spectators instantly voiced on their own with "The journey begins…" And the song swelled person-by-person like a gathering tidal wave as Rei hummed softly to herself, until the crowd joined in _en masse _at "Things that I need to know…" and swept Rei's tune toward the heavens like a firestorm.

As the soulful words of _"The Journey Home"_ finally blew into Naoko Akagi's eardrums with the force of a 70,000-voice hurricane, she found herself gawking at Rei aghast, incredulous as she parroted the Vice President's pleas for order. But if anything silenced Rei while the crowd sang on, it was the appearance of other warlike aerial forms on the broad horizon, rather than any of Naoko's cajoling or threats. She collected herself just as the officials began jury-rigging an evacuation of the stadium before the impending battle got out of hand and turned the arena into a slaughterhouse. "Come along Rei, we're going home; where I will prepare for a late night at my desk after I give you a serious lesson in proper citizenship!" Naoko curtly clamped Rei's hand in her own and began to file towards the stairs in her best order.

That was, Naoko's best order possible when close to 70,000 other souls were singing a antiwar spiritual at the top of their lungs while equally trying to escape impending death from above. After a third attempt to silence her ward's seditious humming of the song shehad put the crowd up to, Naoko gave up and simply focused on weaving through the bedlam around her. _"I may be the proverbial rocket scientist," _Naoko thought, _"but I certainly can't understand children; and probably never will however much I love them. Thank Heaven Ritsuko grew up so quickly, since as is Rei frightens me senseless and the other scientists' kids frustrate me equally." _As the minutes passed and the ever nearing sound of explosions echoed through the archways to the stadium seats, Naoko questioned for a second why she seemed so much less constrained in her shuffle towards the safety of the parking lot and her awaiting minivan. But only for a second, before she turned to look behind and saw only strangers humming where once there had definitely been a blue-haired, juvenile siren mere moments past…

Rei had made her way in typically stealthy fashion to the archway at the very top of the stadium leading to her former seat as she had watched the aerobatic display. Now she stood alone, unobtrusively humming as before and watching the carnage above, a veritable ghost saluting those fallen to an anthem all could agree on: hers.

As before, Rei's crimson eyes evaluated the fighting styles of those four whom she had watched moments ago as she hummed. Then, they had been flying above her in confident majesty, but now they were resigned to battle with desperate caution for the survival of the crowd and themselves. In addition to the first two she recognized, she also discerned one who fiercely watched over the commander, a woman if Rei correctly read the emotions implied by her plane's maneuvers; and another whose gender she couldn't read but clearly happened to be the unit's junior member in all respects, even though probably more skilled than the average fighter pilot one would find anyway.

Even with such a seemingly ramshackle outfit as November City's only defenders at the moment, it seemed as if no squadron the Yuktobanians brought to bear could even touch these four lonely Tomcats as they hacked down each fighter they targeted in turn, their rampage just barely stemming the tide while yet more enemy reinforcements improbably made it to the scene. Just as Rei pondered why they had to fight on alone if Osea had such powerful air defenses in addition to these four elite pilots, her eyes swelled wide in anguished terror as the plane that had been the commander's port wingman took two missiles squarely in its portside engine nacelle. Though the explosion was some miles distant, inside Rei felt as if she had taken those missiles squarely to the gut; and the tears began to well up as she grasped what that had to mean…

But amazingly, the wounded fighter just wrenched itself clumsily back into formation and _dared _the Yuktobanians to come after it again, unleashing its spread of four AIM-54C Phoenix long-range missiles at an incoming squadron on the horizon just to give them its honest opinion. Rei was overwhelmed by that same odd certainty she had felt before, thinking, _"I know this pilot as well, by his spirit if not by name. But we have never met, so how can this be?"_ The end of her question was punctuated with the fiery deaths of three Yuktobanian MiG-31 Foxhounds as the mysterious pilot's Phoenix missiles struck home in rapid succession, only one missile going wide of its mark into the distance since the Ace had struck down that target just after the wingman's launch. He'd rushed in on full afterburner, flinging two AIM-9M Sidewinders up the Foxhound's intakes in a perfect head-on kill and dodging the late Yuke pilot's simultaneous riposte like the aerial samurai he seemed to be.

But the wingman's smoke-trailing Super Tomcat couldn't keep in formation for long, and the Ace's plane banked eastward to confront another threat that Rei couldn't determine as the other pilots broke formation to remain and contest the enemy's claim to air dominance over November International Stadium. Yet more Foxhounds, and Typhoons and Flankers and more besides, fell to the three Osean fighters' rabid defense of their city.

"_Who is attacking now?"_ Rei wondered in thought as she saw a distant object flare up before falling to pieces in the sky; and then another, and yet another which now was clearly a Yuktobanian aircraft. The ominous planes, which she heard a sandy-haired, bespectacled classmate name once as F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters in an unusual show-and-tell routine of his model planes, were a collection of bizarre and threatening angles welded into fuselages that looked the very incarnations of malice. But the terror they might otherwise have brought Rei was missing as she coolly saw the Ace's plane bring them low like an executioner of old carrying out sentence at the sword-testing grounds. While she sang quietly, this fighter's pilot stood out truly as far and away the most puzzling of those Rei had seen and evaluated tonight on both sides.

The man, clearly an Ace in this war if not already an Ace of Aces, flew and fought with justifiable anger at the Yuktobanians' attack on a civilian gathering, but no real hatred of them to speak of; a man quite unlike the Vice President. This man only fought and killed those Yukes in his way because of the war, and he would happily stop the instant the broader conflict did as well. It was as if the pilot himself understood as little about why this war had happened as Rei did. But more comforting to her and importantly for the world, he had a mind to find out and stop the whole sorry juggernaut himself before it was too late for anyone, be it by victory proper or some other means.

The song was barely audible now as virtually all of the crowd had already left, but Rei felt obliged to continue her humming vigil for the four pilots even if alone. Once the last of the angular fighters broke up upon impact of the Ace's cannon burst and its pilot had luckily ejected, Rei jolted in acknowledgement as she eerily felt the Ace's gaze search over her for some reason as the three undamaged fighters desperately circled to help their mortally imperiled comrade.

She stopped humming briefly and breathlessly whispered, "Help him… Please… I do not wish him to die. Both of us… we do not wish him to die! Can you not help him, Blaze?" An explosive thought accompanied the whispers, _"How do I know this pilot's callsign? How can I know?"_ And then the Ace's name, which she had absolutely no reason to know at all but always had nonetheless, fell into her head like a nuclear bomb dropped from Heaven itself as she hesitantly thought, _"Can you not save him… Mr. Kaji?"_

The instant Rei begged this unfathomably familiar hero to pull off one more impossible victory, to save his stricken wingman and thumb his nose yet again at the assembled gods of war, just like he had so many other times that evening, her hopes were (typically) dashed to shards. The wingman's smoking F-14D Super Tomcat, its one good engine not enough to keep it aloft or power its systems, rolled inverted and nosed into a fatal dive towards the circle of stars at the center of the Osean flag painted on the stadium's football field.

Just after the Tomcat set its terminal course thusly, perhaps deliberately so in what Rei took as the pilot's last try to save others despite his inevitable death, she saw the pilot raise his visor and crane his brown eyes upward to meet her own crimson; to fix this child's distant, ghostly and yet comforting face in his memory as the dying, cherry blossoms-on-purple wind liveried plane fell. Rei thought she recognized a sheepish and accepting smile beneath the cockpit's oxygen mask as their eyes locked in understanding, but only a for breath before the smile vanished forever when he ploughed squarely into the center of the Osean flag on the stadium's field, his aircraft crumpling like a paper model the instant before it exploded into a gout of flame and parts.

Rei huddled deep in the shadows of the archway, thankfully safe from the explosion and debris. She dared not ask why she knew how to do this, for there was such a thing as too much raw strangeness to contemplate even for Rei Ayanami. She simply rushed to the banister when the worst of the explosion was past and surveyed the blazing, pulverized wreckage that had once flown valiantly in her defense. With a single, hushed invocation of "_Chopper_," the pilot's callsign she also knew and did not want to question why at the moment, Rei fell to her knees and closed her eyes in silent prayer to mark his passing. Above, far from being demoralized as the Yuktobanians doubtlessly had hoped Chopper's fall would make them, the four pilots turned their planes' Vulcan cannons on the remaining intruders now that their missiles were long expended; displaying their _true _power instead as yet more Yukes fell to their newly-grief-stricken might than before…

Naoko Akagi angrily stared dumbstruck for the second time that evening as Rei knelt in silence before the banister like it was some temple pew, obviously lost in her own little world like always. Placing a hand on her foster child's shoulder, she levelly asked "Do you have anything to say for yourself, Rei; any final offering for that dead hero before we discuss how to deal with your behavior tonight? Speak now! My commuter flight back to Bassett Space Center for the work week is tomorrow, and I'll be working on my report for our mutually admired Dr. Ikari _all night_, so what you say may very well decide how lenient I'll consider being with you."

Rei only nodded at Naoko's words before standing as tall as her childish frame could to look at the approaching Osean fighters: Blaze's formation plus their inexcusably tardy reinforcements. Though she only heard their engines wailing, she knew what this flyby was for; and so Rei began actually singing her peace anthem from the most appropriate place she knew. "If a man can fly over an ocean… / Then no mountains can get in his way… " Blaze's fighter thundered overhead as Rei's voice tolled her defiance of those responsible for this tragedy, leading his two surviving comrades on each wing in echelon.

As the third ship of four F-16C Fighting Falcons trailing Blaze's unit in a diamond pattern passed the stadium scoreboard, it pulled away in a break turn, doing its part in the "missing man" ritual. Rei delivered her improvised coda accordingly by singing the rest of her stanza and the song's conclusion, "Will he fly on forever_…_ / Searching for something to believe/ The more that I try… / The more that I fly… / The answer in itself… will be there."

Rei then looked to Blaze on the horizon as the last glow of sunset caught the metallic purple base to his aircraft's cherry-blossom wind livery, the plane seeming to listen intently as it arced away northwest and she thought but one thing more of him tonight. _"Perhaps my wish will come true after all. If you believe in yourself Blaze… Mr. Kaji… as you have inspired me to believe tonight, then even War itself may not withstand your true power. Take care of yourself, Blaze."_

Turning to her foster mother, Rei saw Naoko quaking in raw, unvarnished rage of a magnitude even the latter found alien to her. Naoko _knew _she should punish Rei severely for the paranoid episode that girl had put her through. But she equally knew those thrice-damned newsmen were there in the stands far below, gawking upward and marveling at Rei as if she were just field-canonized "Patroness of Fallen Aviators" or suchlike rubbish. If the great Dr. Naoko Akagi even hinted at punishing Rei for so _minor_ a sin as running away in the middle of an enemy raid (!), they would gladly ruin even a scientist of her stature on Osean Broadcasting Corporation News itself in defense of their purported saint. "Do you have anything to say for yourself Rei; some attempt to convince me to spare the rod for what some might deem _treason _this night? Well, DO YOU REI AYANAMI?"

The cerulean-haired wisp simply mocked her guardian further by blankly bowing in obedience even as she mumbled, "No. Let us go home, old hag."

Naoko fumed in horror at this throw of the gauntlet. _"HOW DARE SHE, that little bitch! And that smile…" _Naoko imagined her hands crushing Rei's throat in fury for just a second before two things pulled her back from the abyss she'd gladly tiptoed. First, she finally grasped just whom Rei so eerily resembled: her old colleague and even older rival, Yui Ikari, dead since the late Usean War in 2005. If Naoko punished Rei like she really _wanted _to punish her, even in the sanctity of her own home, she thus knew that it would leak out eventually and to the worst possible parties. Second, and worse still, Naoko realized she had tipped her hand to the reporters, and they were already whispering to themselves while pointing both fingers and cameras at her; she was _ruined_ already! Huffing to the universe in general, Naoko led Rei off with a cutting reply of, "Yes indeed. Let's. Go. Home. Now!"

Time blurred as Rei was hustled to the waiting minivan and driven home; blurred almost out of existence as far as Dr. Naoko Akagi was concerned, to the point where this whole night took on the bizarre aspect of a magical realist novella, or a full-blown mystical experience even. Which worried her, because Naoko herself was only as religious as what she felt a traditional Anean home required. Why so many people bent their brains out of shape trying to _believe _that objectively compulsive behaviors, like those at the core of most devotional cults or radical cells, could fill the emptiness inherent in their lives honestly escaped Naoko's comprehension. As had Rei's behavior tonight. Naoko thought in consternation, _"Why? What stupid reason did Rei have to think that those pilots who risked their lives in her defense would appreciate such… OUTRAGES… as she committed tonight? Since when does a dutiful soldier let such ingratitude stand at a time meant to honor his service?"_ But as always, the answer eluded her.

No, her only true god was Science, and her particular High Priest thereof was never far from the womanly part of Naoko's mind, even when they couldn't share her expression of this while slaving away in the nearby Bassett Space Center's bowels; she was bound by protocol after all if nothing else more… pleasing. He was a dark priest, for sure, the kind of man who never asked: _anything_. Which was all well and good for Naoko Akagi since she was his kind of woman in return. You either obeyed her utterly, or else she would obey you the same if you were able to impose your defiance as superior. As was he.

One thing was certain, she would not give those cretins who dared to glorify a juvenile traitor on national television the satisfaction of surrendering that last degree to her temper, where they could practice their usual craft of taking what would have been _justice _and making it seem to be the real crime after all. No, Dr. Naoko Akagi knew the proper course of action was to leave Rei to her room for the night, where she had gone on her own without even asking for dinner after dutifully enduring a token slap that Naoko honestly wouldn't have given but for Rei's inquiry. Sighing in raw exhaustion, Dr. Akagi straightened her papers at her spare desk before turning to an innocuous envelope she'd just received that afternoon. "ICCF… Urgent and Confidential… Eyes only… Addressed to the Guardian of Rei Ayanami? _What?_ Did they find some relative the Eruseans _didn't _make disappear to come and train me in just how to RAISE this unholy child? Meh… if only I were so lucky after today…" Naoko didn't want to know how close to the truth she had guessed as she opened the seal.

Splayed out on the bed in her typically decrepit room, Rei Ayanami paid no heed to the bruise on her right wrist, a relic of her purely customary punishment from Dr. Akagi, as she contemplated the night's events. The war, her being able to gauge the skills of pilots she'd never met; none of it made any sense even after _much _thought. And the energy for such rapidly vanished as Rei surrendered to a fatigue she had never known before. _"What is this? I know I shall awaken when it is time… but part of me feels as if it wants to lay down forever the burdens of many lifetimes before. Why? Just what is… happening… to me?" _Rei pondered her particular condition as she drifted heavily into the tranquil sleep of the innocent.

21:30hrs. 11/29/2010, Sand Island Air Base, Sand Island, Osean Federation territory in the Ceres Ocean.

Blaze, or Captain Ryoji Kaji of the Osean Air Defense Force's 108th Tactical Fighter Squadron as the historians might just care to call him someday if his luck (improbably) ever held again, sat pensively on the lower bunk of his quarters' bed as he held two pictures before him like a pair of deuces in the great poker game of Life. _"They might as well be,"_ he reflected, _"For all the luck they've brought me."_

One was a photo from Albert Genette, the base's assigned reporter: So as not to spoil the moment, the Ryoji Kaji that would soon exist in the world's minds as Blaze because of this photo shoot, stood just obscured enough by his late wingman's elbow to appear faceless yet not dismissive. Said moment being a priceless shot of Kei "Edge" Nagase watching Alvin "Chopper" Davenport give the newest member of what everyone but the bookkeepers called Wardog Squadron, Hans "Archer" Grimm, a combination headlock and noogie to celebrate his return alive from a very… unique... inaugural mission. Few pilots had what it takes to survive when their first combat flight involved taking off in a spare plane on minimal notice to pull interceptor duty over their _own _airbase, afterburning off the runway into mortal combat against bombers and escort fighters trying equally hard to turn said base into so much smoldering rubble.

"That was the _first_ sunset of this war, September 27th…" Kaji closed his eyes to let the truth of just _how much _could change in a mere two months, especially at war, fill him in his entirety. He thought as it did, _"Now I've inexplicably failed another person I cared and took responsibility for."_ Looking to the other photo, Kaji sighed the unmistakable lament of a love cruelly and cleanly cut down before it could truly bloom. The photo showed a young woman with long violet-black hair and bold blue eyes to match the equally so set of her face. "Dearest Misato Katsuragi… you'd be a Captain over there at Heierlark by now, right?"

Kaji's former friend and more in the service had been a part of his life since their second year of community college together in the noted college town of Bana. They went on to the Air Defense Force Academy in Oured together; and it seemed for a brief moment after gaining their commissions in 2008 that the rose-tinted dream Kaji had of someday… _treating… _Misato to the best that microgravity could offer aboard the spaceplane _Arkbird_, might just have been possible after all. But then Misato transferred up without warning to Heierlark AFB, aka the real "North Osea" in that blasted and forlorn land that every soul not living on the military bases or government compounds still proudly called "South Belka." Worse, when the Wardogs had stopped over at Heierlark years later, ostensibly to refuel and repair following their top cover over the Osean naval catastrophe in the Eaglin Straits exactly two months ago, the one Kaji sought out as 1st Lt. Katsuragi was deliberately elsewhere whenever he tried to find her.

"Perhaps I'm doomed to be forevermore known only as 'Blaze.' The one legacy of our love and training days you didn't see fit to destroy, my dearest 'Flash.'" Sleep well, if not with me then…" Kaji began to strip his flight suit off and was down to his tank top before a hard **knock **on the door interrupted him. "Yes?" Kaji quipped in reply.

"Blaze, it's Genette. I've got some footage… from the battle that is… which I think you specifically should see. It's positively uncanny!" Genette's tone of voice said as he entered that he knew Kaji was in one of those moods often entered when Death takes away someone you thought would simply _always _be around: as if there had to be a law of physics against such deaths or something…

Kaji fingered his stubble morosely in thought, deciding whether he really needed to see this night's carnage again. _"Why not? It could hardly be worse than what my brain will play back in my dreams tonight. And if the footage shows that girl I saw… The one with the blue hair, then just maybe I could understand some-…" _Kaji abruptly derailed his train of thought to say, "Go ahead. I've got questions about that battle myself which _you _might just slip past the censors if the commentary survives unsourced."

"Indeed…" Genette grew pensive as he removed the disc from his DVD-RW camcorder and pushed PLAY on Kaji's combined DVD/TV set. The whole night's scene of the battle unfolded before them, with Genette's footage and preliminary commentary growing increasingly rapt as his turns _away_ from the battle and _towards _the mysteriously humming girl who'd instigated the crowd to start singing in the first place grew more frequent. Both Kaji and Genette gaped in mute surprise as Rei clearly whispered Kaji's tactical callsign, 'Blaze,' in a devout plea just barely loud enough for any attentive bystanders to hear. The footage at last fixed on the blue-haired vision just after the missing-man display, as an eerily familiar woman whom Kaji assumed to be the girl's guardian began making a truly garish scene; pathetically trying to regain some semblance of authority over her wayward ward before the world's critical eye.

"Whoa… Do you know that other woman, Genette? I think she had something to do with one of our missions, but I just can't place her. Whoever she is, she's just digging a hole with nothing to plant in it, if you get me…" Kaji sheepishly referred to his gardening hobby whenever he needed an endearing defense mechanism to avoid any uncomfortable realities staring him in the face at the time.

"Oh yes. Dr. Naoko Akagi; _the _finest mind in computer science in Osea, if not the world, currently chief technical assistant to the Bassett Space Center's Special Projects Division head: Dr. Gendo Ikari. The latter actually paid a visit to McNealy AFB right before you guys took the trainees back here to Sand Island. Said something about 'seeing if the skies were to be handed down to a new generation,' or not when I got the chance to interview him for a precious few minutes. An interesting guy, sure, but _not _preferred company under any circumstances."

Kaji nodded silently. As was customary for any warrior long tested in battle, whatever his battlefield and age, he'd sized up Dr. Ikari that moment without even really thinking about it and immediately hit a quandary. The scientist literally carried himself like a weapon, completely confident and driven, but had said nothing beyond the one cryptic remark Genette had mentioned about any past military service whatsoever. Kaji had heard of him before though, and knew that tales of Dr. Ikari having risen up from the _lower _rungs of Osean society to his current prominence were probably true, and could account for part of his attitude. But there was no mistaking the bearings of a trained combat pilot once one got a good enough look at them. "If I had to guess, I'd say he was a mercenary pilot once. Hell, he's old enough to have flown way back in the damned Belkan War fifteen years ago for all we know! And that's not counting the killing the various mercs made over in Usea for seven years straight…"

Genette stiffened as he recalled the seven years of horror that had convulsed Osea continent's entire eastern neighbor, Usea continent, which he'd covered during journalism school for various projects. It all began with a Usea-wide coup attempt in 1998 that sparked a hybrid international and civil war; and then continued through the disaster of asteroid Ulysses XF1994-04's breakup over, and impact predominantly upon, that same continent. The whole sanguinary affair only petered out once Usea's fascist westernmost state of Erusea, ironically the main sponsor of resistance to the 1998 coup, failed in its 2002-5 bid to subject all other Usean states under its own dominion. "Yeah. Wherever and whatever Dr. Ikari may have been then, I'm sure his services were highly in demand. At a premium too, no doubt…"

"Genette… What do you make of the girl? How are you going to spin this for the suits back in Oured to even remotely consider letting air?" Kaji hated the idea of having to 'spin' a little girl's song for peace, but he knew certain things simply had to be done in this world if some good was to be salvaged at all. Especially a world at war.

"Rei Ayanami…" Genette remarked wonderingly at what minimal he had gleaned from his preliminary interview with one of Dr. Akagi's coworkers at the Space Center, which he suspected would remain the entirety of what he'd ever learn barring a _true _miracle. "Honestly, I don't know. I can't find anything at all about her other than her status as Dr. Akagi's foster child and a purported birthdate of March 30th 2001, which is supported with no other documentation _at all_ besides her ICCF adoption papers according to those in the know. I doubt anything I do will make this footage work for the censors; they're under Appelrouth's control almost to the man anyway." Genette knew that much already, and it was more than he cared to given the situation.

"And I really don't know if I _need _to spin it. You know what the people are already calling her, Blaze? 'The Blue Ghost of November Stadium!' Barely five hours gone and they're already splitting into camps over this girl; most trying to make her into a divine harbinger for peace even as those under Applerouth's sway call her a little demoness aiding the enemy. I won't be surprised if she makes sainthood by the end of the week… No, what I'm concerned about is why she called _you _out by name, Blaze? Why?" Genette looked equal parts hopeful and repelled, perhaps simply by the sheer strangeness of the whole situation. It would be difficult enough explaining away the mass protest song as was, even if all traces of its instigator were excised from the official record; and he, for one, didn't envy his part in that near certain task one bit.

"Oh, stop it Genette!" Kaji indulged his penchant for moodiness at what struck him as a rare asinine question from the normally insightful reporter. "Just stop it! She probably read about it in yourarticle about us all two months ago." Kaji's cool returned swiftly, however. "We need to focus on _surviving_ this war so that the truth, whatever it is, can ever emerge. You've done your job well simply by recording this footage to begin with; some copies would be good just in case, though. After all, it's not every day a reporter has a 'secret stash' the historians would actually care to examine, is it?"

Genette recovered from Kaji's micro-tantrum with only the appropriate degree of sarcasm. "Right… Thanks Blaze. I think I can see part of what Rei saw in you today, if her body language is any indication." Genette walked to the door before asking back, "Do you think she's alright… Blaze? Dr. Akagi doesn't strike you as the kind of woman to…?"

"Not quite. Perhaps if she'd been alone with the girl when this had happened, but not any other way. I saw her as well as Dr. Ikari at McNealy Base after we flew cover for their mass driver launch supplying the Arkbird. A completely formal person, she'll do everything that's expected of her precisely _because _it is so; the only crimes she'd ever commit are crimes of passion. And _you_, Genette, helped deter her from doing so in this case just by filming her. So yes, your little blue angel is still alive; hell, probably watching over us all right now, too." Kaji remarked at his eerie luck in having the only women who'd cared for him thus far be a fiendishly mercurial bombshell, a fanatical wingmate grieving for the probable loss of her teacher, and a freakishly beautiful child, respectively; and all utterly unavailable for their own various reasons.

"Yeah. We sure could use her now, heading back to Yuktobania and all." Genette knew that the climax of the war was approaching as Osean forces pushed towards the Yuke capital of Cinigrad now that the Yuke Army was mostly smashed in the Battle of the Jilachi Desert. He left to pack his things for whatever reporting flights might need making for the coming missions' aftermaths.

"Yeah," Kaji remarked to himself darkly as he paused the playback at the point where the blue-haired phantom knelt in prayer after Chopper crashed into the stadium center. "We sure could…" He ejected the DVD, turned off the player, cut off the lights and hit the sack in rapid succession.


	3. Lives and Deaths

Ace Combat Evangelion: Aces' Heritage 

Chapter 3: Lives and Deaths…

Chapter A/N: Mostly as for Chapter 1. This is a _long _one that also skips about in time several places, as it is really all about wrapping up the Eva characters' pasts in the AC world before Chapter 4 gets right down to what conflict _they'll_ have to resolve that the past aces left behind. Again, I write as if Anea were the AC world's Japan, so things Japanese shall be called Anean until Namco specifies another country instead in AC canon, which I shall then edit them to be of promptly. Regarding the Demon Lord/Mobius One connection, it is _heavily _implied in Ace Combat Zero's loading-screen verses and I don't consider the Gauntlet mission to be any more than a fanboy-style Ace's round, as it were. A fun mission, but devoid of canonical authority nonetheless. 

Warnings: Angst, seriously adult themes, character suicide and attempts, remembered gory violence, and other general unpleasantness associated with war and/or its aftereffects all ahead.

Time: Unknown Time, possibly 3/30/2016. Location: Interdimensional Twilight Zone linked to post-Third Impact Earth (Evangelion Universe). 

Rei stepped out of the imaginary door leading back to oblivion from the Space of Absolute Freedom dourly, only a slight frown betraying her thoughts besides. "That was not funny, Lieutenant Colonel Alvin H. Davenport." Rei denied him the use of his callsign as a punishment she saw fitting for a man she really couldn't injure; not like she had Shinji the first time he'd offended her, an incident she truly regretted now. Not that she would exactly care to hurt Chopper, anyway. He had been so kind to her, after all, and _this _Rei Ayanami was particularly tired of rejecting people she didn't have to. "I was forced to do something similar to what that world's Rei Ayanami did with you as part of the Third Impact process, only I was the one causing the deaths involved with each and every one of the billions of souls living on my particular Earth." The memory still forced Rei to silence even if it hadn't been unpleasant for her per sé; at least at the immediate moment it occurred.

"Don't remind me; I saw most of that too on the way here." Chopper was beginning to tell that her sense of humor, when it chose to exist at all on rare occasion, clearly had little to nothing in common with his. "But enough about death; Jeez Rei, you're so serious you _really_ make me want to cry sometimes, you know! Don't you see that if you just concentrate 100 percent on the world you want to find your way to and let it happen, like Shinji did before with that "Happy Tokyo-3" parallel world he found, you can get back home in no time flat?" He sincerely hoped his whole effort here since he'd heard this world's Instrumentality come crashing both into and out of being, with an appropriately deafening psychic roar each time, hadn't amounted to a mere practical joke in bad taste. Not that he exactly _minded _pulling those from time to time, either; but this was not the time!

"Yes, but it is not that simple, Chopper." Rei had decided she was finished being peeved at him. "I can only visit a world where another of me already exists, infiltrating my consciousness into hers as my prior selves did with me; or else where there is an amount of unused LCL equal to or greater than my body mass present, to support a manifestation of myself." She left unstated the corollary fact that there were relatively few worlds that met either of those requirements; most of these hardly better choices than the one she'd been created in, comparatively speaking. "Not to mention that this soul's presence inside another of itself was every bit as taxing on that one as the presence of my prior selves within me before Complementation."

"Yeah, but I'm sure you'll find another Rei you just want to give a big ol' hug and complement onto one day." Chopper then slapped himself as he remembered. "AH! What am I saying? Never mind, Rei." He stood up and bowed slightly in farewell. "While on that topic, I _think _I can sense that version of me I talked about earlier. I guess your Third Impact changed more about your world than I thought at first… If you don't mind, miss 'Blue Ghost of November Stadium,' I'll be off for now."

"For now?" Rei queried expectantly, a pensive smile emerging on her face. "Might this other Chopper and myself see each other again someday? It would be most agreeable." She silenced herself as she eyed him over. Rei had known precious few in her past life who she could remotely call friends, but she felt the beginnings of a much better start for the next.

"You bet Rei-chan!" Chopper remembered the diminutive that Nagase had used for his world's Rei once Blaze and Genette showed the other Wardogs the stadium footage; after watching their mutual commentary from his perch in the Great Beyond for a spell, that is. "And I think I just might have a present that would be right up your alley when you do. Don't make me wait too long now, okay?"

Rei pondered his request. In a way, she herself wanted to watch her other selves for a while before returning to her own life, especially since she'd been denied such an opportunity without her knowledge the last time it had been present in her own world. "Yes. You too, Chopper."

"Great." Chopper strode through the door to the Space of Absolute Freedom; his last words out being, "Yahoo! Hello Dreamland, here I come so don't start the party without me!"

Rei sat down again and silently pondered the emptiness around her, planning the route she would take in the future. Back to Shinji; to Captain Misato Katsuragi; to Asuka, whom she suspected would have a _vastly_ changed attitude in the future; to her other classmates with whom she had much catching up to do; and yes, even her supposed father Commander Ikari, if he chose to return and the world would allow it. For many reasons, Rei seriously doubted that would happen easily, if at all.

But it was Rei's hope, nonetheless. And right now, that was all she had, and all she particularly wanted to begin with…

Time: 04:00hrs 3/25/2015. Location: Office of Head Director Dr. Gendo Ikari, Classified Annex, Bassett Space Center, Osean Federation, Osea Continent on Planet Earth (Strangereal Universe).

The blue light running along the wall screens cast an eerie glow upon the scruffy ethnic Anean man in a lab coat seated at the room's only desk, positioned beneath a full depiction of the Systema Sephirotica that covered the entire ceiling. And in a neither subtle nor inaccurate indication of this man's power, as far as this facility and its personnel were concerned, a desk sited exactly under the Kether or "Crown" Sephirot, the seat of the unknowable Almighty God.

Seated before him was a moon-pale, blue-haired girl who looked to be just near fourteen years old, at least superficially so if you discounted her more than generous beauty for that or any other age. She stared at him, her crimson eyes filled with a most peculiar combination of blankness and admiration as she asked, "Why have you summoned me here, sir? My birthday is still five days from now and I do not understand the significance of this date for you."

"I find that hard to believe, Rei." Gendo intoned chidingly as he reached into his desk and pulled out a small mahogany case. Setting it on his desk, he continued. "Surely I have arranged better schooling than that in all my years of caring for you. Unless of course the federal government has decided to demonstrate to me yet again its expertise in the fine art of wasting taxpayers' money." He idly rested his left fingertips on a lacquered mahogany case while those of his right hand remained fixed on his glasses. "What major phase in world history began on this day twenty years ago, Rei?"

Her eyes lit up in eager understanding at his latest test for her. "I see, sir. You are referring to the Belkan War. Begun on March 25th 1995 with a massive _blitzkrieg_ style air-land assault on the borders of the Osean Federation, the Republic of Ustio, and the Kingdom of Sapin by the Principality of Belka. And ended on June 20 of that year with the signing of the Treaty of Lumen following Belka's defeat by those same Allies plus forces of the Union of Yuktobanian Republics, mandating its disarmament to within agreed defensive limits and surrender of all but the northern territories of the Principality itself." No, Rei's schooling had not been a waste of time and money after all. Gendo smiled faintly in relief at her textbook summary before she queried. "Were you involved in these events somehow, sir?"

"Yes, Rei." Gendo intoned with his customary certitude when getting to the point. "Suffice it to say that everything I need to tell you can be revealed by your own hand. Open this case, and examine its contents if you wish to know more. I find mere words inadequate when the truth must be told; indeed, as they always are." Gendo looked expectantly at her now as he gently pushed the case towards Rei. Its polished simplicity was marred only by contrasting motifs of zeroes and infinities dueling and yet merging at the same time, scrolling along the beveled edges of the case's paneling as if inscribed on the sheath of an ancient and renowned blade.

Silently, reverently; how else could Rei open this latest gift from the man who had done so much for her in the lonely years since her first guardian here in Osea, Dr. Naoko Akagi, received word that an unspecified yet direct relative of Rei had been found? And not just anyone; none other than Naoko's then-lover, Dr. Gendo Ikari himself, had initiated legal action to gain sole custody of the young Rei Ayanami in light of this perceived rightful claim and allegations of neglect on Naoko's part. Following this disclosure, this betrayal from the absolute least expected direction, the late Dr. Akagi threw herself in despair from her office balcony to the swimming pool waiting a fatal three stories below. What Rei saw in the mahogany case made her breathe in an uncharacteristic display of awestruck astonishment.

Gleaming celestially in the room's suffusing blue light, medal upon citation upon decoration presented themselves to Rei's young eyes as she marveled at this: the tangible essence of her guardian's true past. She really didn't recognize the various medals themselves, being a mere schoolgirl herself despite her more than usually unique precociousness; but she _did_ recognize the two unit patches and their respective rank insignia, which were fastened upside down to the velvet of the case's roof, all figuratively looking down upon the medals earned under their aegis.

"Lieutenant Colonel, 6th Air Division, 66th Air Force Unit 'Galm,' Ustian Air Force…" Rei had heard her classmates mention legends about this mercenary unit from the Belkan War whenever the topic came up; especially Kensuke Aida, the self-proclaimed military 'expert' in her class despite the impossibility of his actually having served. He practically never shut up about the exploits of the 'Demon Lord,' purported leader of Galm Squadron, in the dogfighting arena internationally renowned as the Round Table: Area B7R. All this tall telling inevitably forced the teacher to firmly remind Kensuke that all the proven records state is the existence of this unit and its general involvement in the war; any more commentary than this was mere conspiracy theory and would not be tolerated in the classroom.

"And also Lieutenant Colonel or Commander in the combined 118th Tactical Fighter Wing and VFW-118 'Mobius,' Independent State Allied Forces…" Rei knew much more about this combined air and naval unit since its actions were so notorious as to be beyond the possibility of concealment by the powers that be. During the final iteration of Usea continent's recent troubles, the 2002-5 Erusean war of conquest, this squadron had single handedly enabled the most lopsided military comeback in her world's known history: the resurgence of the Independent State Allied Forces from controlling only the Comona Islands and island portions of the isolated Usean country North Point, to an amphibious assault on the Usean mainland culminating in the storm of Erusea's capital of Farbanti itself, with the Mobius Wing as the offensive's spearhead.

Mobius One, that wing's mysterious flight lead whom many military scholars compared to the legendary "Demon Lord of the Round Table," was arguably the one ace that Kensuke blathered on about _more _than that latter semi-fictitious icon of airpower. Indeed, that he obsessed over like some others to a point of near-worship utterly beyond Rei's ken since only one person could ever deserve such accolade in her young, crimson eyes. That train of thought, however, naturally brought Rei crashing to the inevitable revelation sitting in her very hands.

"These medals… these patches… these silver leaves of rank. They cannot mean; and yet they must. Commander Ikari… who are you? Who… are you?" Rei's question took on a unique breathless air as the only sane realization, and that not by much, struck home squarely in the pit of her soul and forced her to ask the question she'd simultaneously prayed and dreaded to ask for five endless years.

"Yes, Rei. You understand now. It warms my heart that you used my old naval rank for whenever we Mobius pilots had to deploy from a carrier, since mercenaries are only known by pay grade or self-styled rank outside of any particular service." Gendo smiled contentedly as Rei attempted to hand him the case back. "Keep it. Like the skies, it belongs to a new generation now." She closed it equally reverently as it had been opened and clutched it to her chest with both hands, closing her eyes and bowing her head in contemplation just before a hard knock rapped at the door.

"Enter." Gendo wasted no time in his command to this stranger, as he never did in any matter at all.

The door opened and a portly, fatherly-looking man of middle age and in what looked like mechanics' coveralls sauntered in like this office was his ancestral home somehow. Rei suspected he did that everywhere, and felt nothing about him to suggest he had no right or reason to either. As always, she simply watched and listened; it seemed her very essence most of the time.

"It must be said that I do not approve of what you have made of yourself these past twenty years, _Huckebein_." Gendo scowled in his typical manner for the rest of the world, his sole other family out there included. "From the legendary ace Colonel Wolfgang '_Huckebein_' Buchner of the Belkan Air Force to Osean Air Defense Force 2nd Lt. Peter N. Beagle, a lowly transport pilot and technician, is quite a fall indeed."

"So what? I left that old identity behind years ago. And _I _for one can't say I particularly like what you've made of yourself by now either, Dr. Ikari. Or should I call you…"

Rei shut this stranger up in mid sentence by standing bayonet upright and squarely fixing his eyes with a crimson gaze to match. She began icily, "How dare you speak to Him in such a manner," her peculiar emphasis on the pronoun being quite intentional. "You should…" Rei continued, but Gendo cut her off just as she had _Huckebein_.

"No, Rei. He has every right to speak as he wishes." Gendo corrected her with characteristic firmness. "Your defense is appreciated, but inappropriate. You may leave us now." It was not a request; Dr. Gendo Ikari was not the type of man to make requests. Ever.

"Yes sir." Rei bowed in deference to Gendo, and him only most pointedly, before gracefully exiting the office like a moonlit shadow that hardly seemed to have been there at all. She paid _Huckebein_ not one glance or remark in passing.

"Quite a daughter you have there, If I may say so myself… Demon Lord." _Huckebein_ cut to the chase, feeling that was the only way he could get a proper footing against so formidable an adversary for the settling of accounts he had come for. Clearly this man hadn't lost any of his eclipsing power from twenty years prior, merely transmuted it to a new form for what was arguably a new world since the war.

"You may not. She is near to such in point of law, and as dear to me as well in point of the heart; but she is not so just the same. And if you find your old handle inappropriate, your lordship," Gendo meant that last with no small degree of grudging respect due an old foe fallen on what would look like hard times to some, "I am aware of a certain 'Pops' who has done more than his share to ensure that the skies are indeed passed down to the next generation of warriors."

"Thanks, young knight-errant." Though he wasn't overly conservative in his manner or opinions, the ace formerly known as '_Huckebein_ the Raven,' now simply the mechanic nicknamed Pops, felt such chivalrous terms more than appropriate to express the brotherhood of combat pilots across all nations. Indeed, in his homeland of Belka, the arm-of-service colors or _waffenfarben _on all _Luftwaffe _uniform trappings was golden yellow; precisely to indicate the pilot officers' self-styled descent from the Belkan Knights of old, and the extinct Cavalry arm more generally. "It took me quite by surprise when I found my old plane sitting in the Solo Island boneyard's museum last year, painstakingly reassembled as per the order of some mysterious donor with the time, money, _and _pull to totally restore a trashed MiG-21 Fishbed found still lying at the Round Table where it fell."

When Pops had been shot down over Area B7R on May 28th 1995 following his attempted defection to the Allied Forces with the help of the Osean ace codenamed "Heartbreak One," the entire aerial _Gestapo_ that was Schwarze squadron had pursued him with the aid of an ex-wingman of his, Ashley "Grabacr" Berlitz; whom Pops thought had taken the lucky shots downing him and the Osean pilot. Pops' honor had prompted his technical act of treason, since he could never drop a nuclear weapon on his own people as he knew he'd be ordered to soon, even if to stem an invasion. _That _had been the overmatched Belkan General Staff's last straw to prevent a total Allied overrun of their homeland from the south following the supposedly impending fall of Dinsmark, Belka's by then blockaded capital, to a Yuktobanian amphibious assault from the north. That particular _Götterdämmerung_ never materialized, however, the Yukes being content to stick with blockade of and Naval Spetsnaz raids against Dinsmark as a psychological warfare ploy. Thus Belka cast itself into eternal infamy as the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons on its own soil, and for scarce reason in the end.

"What can I say," Gendo Ikari smiled as sheepishly as possible for one so naturally confident as an ex-ace of his caliber. "You were a legend even before my time, one I felt it only fitting to honor when I found out exactly who piloted the lone Fishbed I dispatched that day over the Round Table." Gendo stood and remarked, "After all: memories and relics are all any of us have when our time is past, and the student _must _smite the master in battle for the rite of succession to be complete.

"Oh yeah, but you didn't see fit to take down 'Grabacr' while you were at it, right?" The sarcastic new voice stormed into Gendo's office in a huff, a scruffy middle-aged pilot thinner than Pops and wearing the gold leaves of an Osean Air Defense Force Major on his dress uniform's shoulder straps. "I suspect no small partof the reason it took me sixteen years to finally make Major had to do with the simple expense of losing my very first Tomcat back then, when that no good Ashley smoked it before _you _could take him out! And then there's the matter of the Gray Men, of course, whom I recently found out weren't _all _ex-Belkan fascists after all." The intruder, Major Jack 'Heartbreak One' Bartlett, cast a telling glance at the now Dr. Gendo Ikari.

"You speak too much with too few facts in hand, _Major_." Though his favorite rank of the various ones he'd used in his time _was _naval, Commander Gendo Ikari still felt it heartening, if not technically appropriate, to pull that rank even in retirement when addressed so impertinently by someone of an inferior pay grade; service privileges be damned. "Your bravery is commendable, but your recklessness in not properly securing your rendezvous with your friend here, the defector, is precisely why Grabacr was able to shoot you down before I could deal with him. And you need not worry Fuyutsuki," Gendo turned to his immediate subordinate here at Bassett as the man stood panting in the doorway, exhausted from chasing Bartlett after he barged past the waiting room when Pops had been gone too long in his judgment. "I approved both of these men to see me some time ago; in strictest secrecy, of course."

"Fine, Commander. But with all due respect, _please _inform me of the exact number of persons per such appointment in the future. I cannot carry out my duties as your assistant when keep such details from me!" Fuyutsuki may have been exaggerating his superior's tendencies with that last, since Gendo was _far _better at taking advice than he appeared at first glance, but it conveyed the former's annoyance appropriately all the same.

"Duly noted, Fuyutsuki. You may go." The man complied forthwith with Gendo's dismissal, and the latter resumed his reminiscences. "Interruptions aside, I have invited you here because you both can assist me in an endeavor worthy of your respective skills." Gendo passed out several miniature booklets detailing his project before continuing on. "One that shall define the skies of battle for some time to come: the fusion of man and machine into one unsurpassed weapons system." Gendo handed out pamphlets detailing the objectives and specifications of his latest military project.

"And if we say 'No Dice?' This hardly sounds like the kind of work respectable pilots like us would engage in, you know?" Bartlett had hardly even looked at his copy of the technical briefing handed to him, entitled "The next generation of Computer For Flight Information/COFFIN Systems: The Past of War births the Future of Battle, Today!" The brochure's subtitle read: "A Project of General Resource, Limited."

"

Yeah. It doesn't feel like five years at all since we both got finished with the _last _ultimate weapon you and your paymasters at Gründer Industries completed here." He didn't have to shudder at the memory of the Strategic Orbital Linear Gun, or SOLG, and the havoc its V2 nuclear shells had wrought near the close of Osea's fraudulently provoked war with Yuktobania in 2010. The horror was all too vivid even now. The SOLG design itself had existed since well before Dr. Ikari had even become the Demon Lord in the 1995 war, true; but for reasons doubtless his own Gendo had nonetheless abetted the SOLG's completion by Osea in the name of those very Belkan extremists he had once defeated.

"Please, gentlemen," Gendo asked with impeccable reason. "I had very little to do with that project, and I am _not_ one of those you speak of at what is now called General Resource Limited in any but the loosest sense. I work towards their interests only when its suits my own, as they try to with me as well. It is the way of this world. If you believe so as well, then your interests are best served by my proposal; and if you desire to change it, then you _also_ have no alternative but to accept my proposal."

Several tense moments passed in silence. Eventually however, seeing Gendo's logic, Pops merely nodded his preliminary assent as Bartlett took a more vocal approach. "As long as we're training pilots like we do best, I guess it shouldn't be too bad. And speaking of things not being too bad, I saw 'beautiful' out there, with what looked like _your _medal case clutched to her chest, as I was running from your number two. Do you now rob the cradle in _both_ ways, Demon Lord? Or did you just rock hers at night way back when instead?"

"Hardly either, **_Major_**." Gendo had even less patience for asinine errors than merely ignorant ones, and showed it in subdued but perceptible growl of distaste. "She is my legacy: the vessel of my hope, the monument of my sorrow, and the salvage from my only defeat in ten years of battle amidst the skies."

Pops raised his eyebrow in polite incredulity as Bartlett nearly choked in amazement. "You? The mighty Demon Lord was once defeated? I'd really like to hear this after all your talk of succeeding me, my young _squire_-errant!" Pops guffawed heartily in mock-chastisement as he tried to picture this rough customer of a man, much less legend of a pilot, ever getting the short end of a fight.

"Yeah! Who the hell is so good as to beat both the Demon Lord and Mobius One in a single go, as they say? That's what I've gotta know." Bartlett's disbelief was swiftly transmuting to intrigue

"You shall; of those parts it is convenient for me to let you know. They directly concern my first training candidate for you as it so happens…" Gendo's shallow smile arched upwards as he considered whom he meant.

Time: 16:55hrs, 3/14/2005. Location: Los Canas AFB, Federation of Central Usea, Usea Continent on planet Earth. (Strangereal Universe).

Like most else in his life had, this moment had begun innocuously; but was naturally leading to a devastating conclusion. Yes, the mission to rescue two Air Ixiom airliners ferrying defecting international scientists from the Erusean superweapon complex Stonehenge had indeed begun simply enough and been resolved equally so.

Scarcely an hour later, after both refugee aircraft were down safely in Independent State Allied Forces' territory, the pilot of that lone haze-blue F-22A surveyed the carnage on the tarmac from within his gold-foiled cockpit. Ostensibly a stealth measure against radar only, the combination of it and his flight helmet served very well to obscure his identity from the casualties he had a particular eye on.

The first burned Gendo Ikari, the ace now known as Mobius One after shedding the Demon Lord identity gained under his old surname Rokubungi, like raw acid drops put in his tears. That was precisely why he refused to look away, to diminish the necessary pain of this moment. Though the corpse was covered over in respect, he'd recognize the resolute, willowy frame laid out on the mortuary stretcher even if viewing from at the absolute edge of visual range. _"Yui. My strategy…_our _strategy for dealing with the Eruseans wasn't good enough, was it?"_

When the fascist regime that had seized control of the Federal Republic of Erusea following the Ulysses XF1994-04 asteroid fragment impacts had decided to claim Stonehenge as its own ultimate weapon back in 2003, Yui Ikari and her husband had agreed on a dual-track plan to reclaim their livelihood. Neither wanted what Erusea had planned for the Usean continent; and even if they _had _sympathized with Erusea's goals, they could not in any case permit it to discover the _other _secret that lay buried beneath the Stonehenge site; the actual reason construction had taken so long throughout the 1990s and was still ongoing besides. So when the war reached its crisis point in late 2004 with the ISAF driven off the continent to North Point, Gendo was suddenly given Yui's blessing, tantamount to an order from a woman who was fully his equal indeed, to disappear from the Stonehenge site and make his way to join ISAF as a pilot.

"_Our last night together… I nearly couldn't believe you were asking me to become the Demon Lord again. I'd married you; I loved you to leave that part of my life behind forever and find my completion in the sciences of life rather than those of death. But you were correct, as always Yui: Fate, as constructed by the choices of others, would not allow that happy ending for me. Did you see _this_ end coming for you that night, my love?_ Gendo Ikari, or Mobius One as he corrected himself and would for the duration of this damnable war, wondered.

Mobius One looked to Shinji, the latter already subsiding in belligerence now that he'd been strapped to a stretcher and forcibly sedated following his tantrum after getting off the plane with no family in sight. A lonely girl clutching a worn storybook was watching the scene ashen. She looked so like the aircraft's first officer, the former ace Kei 'Edge' Nagase, obviously a younger relative of some sort. Had she done something for Shinji to justify gazing so intently after him? If so then yes, all acts of kindness were indeed doomed to be so ephemeral, Mobius One decided on further reflection over the whole situation in general.

When he'd made rendezvous with the Air Ixiom planes, Mobius One had felt the most peculiarly unsettling feeling, as if he were already being targeted by a source that wasn't activating any of his warning systems. He had actually wondered whether another Erusean pilot was making an entirely visual attack approach before realizing, on an entirely subliminal level, what was going on. His own son, Shinji, was accusing him from afar of the most heinous sin imaginable in the four year old's eyes. The father had indeed failed mother and son, an indictment returned a conviction when First Officer Nagase had radioed Mobius One the cause of Air Ixiom Flight 701's difficulty.

Later events would prove this moment to have been critical to the coming developments. It had been, in nearly every sense of the word, the Fall of Mobius One. He thought, _"Hopefully our contingency plan for Rei was carried out by our old assistant, Yuko. If so, all I have to do is win and set to finding Rei again. If not… then things become more difficult. Elaborate, yes; risky, even more so; but still achievable once I have sufficient resources." _As he popped the Raptor's canopy now that Shinji was safely unconscious, Mobius One set to preparing for his future, both in the immediate missions to come and beyond…

Time: 15:31hrs, 4/20/2015. Location: Stier Castle, Principality of Belka, Osea Continent on planet Earth (Strangereal Universe).

Shinji Ikari wandered the wasteland of this once-majestic landscape walking his bicycle beside him; the barren browns of the dirt, the pallid green receding forests and the lake-filled blast crater being the only real distinguishing marks aside from the nigh-deserted town of Stier itself to accompany the mute sentinel that was the local castle. His classmates at the school in Sudentor, where his aunt and uncle lived and had him attend, claimed that it looked like the end of the world whenever field trips across the border were arranged. _"Sure fits. Especially with my life the way it is."_

That thought prompted Shinji to make sure his backpack was securely tightened, concealing his few provisions and its most important cargo, his one possession that could be called 'treasured' in any real sense. Seeing to it that he wasn't being watched, a sound precaution even if the Waldreich Mountains weren't the best-monitored of borders, he again mounted up and began pedaling the rough trail towards the castle looming scarce kilometers distant.

He quickly reached the castle and, against all odds, saw that a way in was already open through the driveway gate leading into the main courtyard. _"Huh. That's strange. What's anybody's business here? Hell, what's my business here now that I think…? NO, don't think! All that does is bring the memories back! And I don't need them… No; I don't need them at all…"_

After suppressing that particular traumatic line of thought and parking his bike in the shadows near an ancient guard post jutting from the courtyard's Northern wall, Shinji barged through another improbably open door into the castle's inner keep, only subliminally noticing the exquisite BMW sedan parked just opposite his bike in his dark concentration. A seemingly minor detail that would influence the day's events, and thus Shinji's life, in ways he couldn't begin to imagine.

He wandered the castle's ancient halls in mute astonishment; it wasn't at all like he'd expected and he quietly said, "What…? Some castle this turned out to be; this place is a _dump_!" Shinji had seen the huge section of the walls that had been destroyed by some unknown power on his way in. Maybe it was from some siege long ago; from the war twenty years past; or perhaps even from the scrap with the Yukes five years ago, as his e-mail pal Kensuke Aida kept surmising from all his conspiracy theory research on the legendary Demons of Razgriz? Shinji doubted that one, as he did all the rest besides, but the vanishingly rare exchanges did nonetheless make an objectively lonely life _marginally _more bearable.

Whatever the cause, Shinji saw ample evidence this castle had known better days all around, and not recent ones at that. As he passed the ghostly dining hall, bullet holes peered out from odd angles at incongruous points in the walls, chairs, even the still-dressed table itself as if some drunken firefight had seen fit to carve itself into history one day. _"Odd,"_ Shinji thought. _"I know Belkans are supposed to be prickly about their honor, especially if they're nobility like the Albrecht Knights that once owned this place. But isn't all this a bit extreme even for _them_?"_ Shinji doubted the words 'Belkan' and 'Extremist' went together _that _well, for his part; even if they usually had much in common, as the War had made clear.

His reverie was rudely, and fatefully as later retrospective would have it, interrupted by a harsh **_BANG! _**"That… that sounds like a gun!" Shinji galloped through the stone archway leading into further into the keep from the now not-so-Great Hall and barreled up the nearby tower stairs towards the sound's origin. He soon found it.

His brains splayed across several battlements, a dead man stared hollowly up at the oppressive clouds in death, a Belkan-issue H&K P8 USP lying dejectedly in his right hand. He looked a bookish sort, complete with glasses now broken on the tower floor in a pool of blood and worse; but he also wore the full dress uniform of a Lieutenant Colonel in the Belkan Air Force, something Shinji recognized from his exchanges with Kensuke even if he couldn't exactly place who this late officer was. "Poor… poor bastard! I think I've seen his face before somewhere too, but… OH WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE TALKING TO MYSELF ABOUT A CORPSE!" Leaving the matter to the police to find, since there was _no _way he would touch that body unless somebody physically made him, Shinji started to fumble with his bag as he attempted to salvage the purpose of his journey here: listening to his favorite SDAT music tape at the 'end of the world;' to disappear from life, if only for a time at least.

"THEN WHY… _DON'T_ YOU… _IDIOT_?" A haughtily exasperated female voice screamed brokenly up at him from a cracked window some stories below, obviously in excruciating pain despite its defiant edge.

Shinji looked down to reply back with "SHUT UP! Can't you just forget all about me and get lost… or something?" His trailing off came when he sickened at the risk he had just taken attempting to peer into the window; it was _that _far down to the jagged cliffs this castle sat atop below.

Again the mysterious girl replied before trailing off herself, "What do you… THINK I'm doing… _dummkopf…?_" Shinji raced down to where he thought her voice was coming from in the keep below. What he saw when he got there required Shinji to summon all his limited fortitude or else keel over in vomiting up an entire week's food.

Immersed in a pool of her own bloody bathwater, ebbing out of life at an accelerating pace as her incompletely slit wrists emptied yet more blood into the macabre suspension she lay in, was a stunning redhead much of Shinji's age clearly focusing her gaze out the window at the blast crater cum lake. "So… _schweinhund_… are you gonna leave? Or perhaps… just get off on… a naked girl dying before you instead? If so, at least have the… _decency_… to do it where I don't have to smell you on my way… home… I guess." The girl fainted and her breathing became increasingly ragged with each second. As if to emphasize her blasé attitude towards impending death, the stranger's clothes were all neatly folded on the old-fashioned toilet's seat next to the tub; a modern college uniform that Shinji thought he recognized as belonging to the University of Dinsmark lying in stark contrast to the antiquated room around.

Shinji recoiled at the very suggestion she'd just made; at the fact that she was beautiful enough to very nearly compel him to take her up on the offer; and at Life in general for being so fundamentally _screwed up _as to leave him in positions like this all the damn time, when the responsibility oddly resolved itself as it usually did when Shinji's coping skills fell usually short. His cries of "WHAT? Are you… out of your goddamned _mind_? What kind of guy do you take me for? What am I even doing here talking to a second suicide in one day anyhow? Can't somebody HELP ME?" must have been unusually effective this time around as they were answered by great doors being nearly ripped off their hinges in desperation at opposite ends of the castle by two would-be rescuers.

The first, a man whom Shinji suspected usually sounded calmer than now even compared to most people, bellowed out through the halls, "ASUKA? Is that you, girl? Asuka Langley Soryu don't you _dare_ be dead or I am SO going to kick your little ass before I throw earth on its coffin! Ah forget that; you're probably pulling this stunt for that very reason, and I've gotta say the whole 'Seductress Drama Queen' act stops _right now _young lady. Yeah, you heard me Asuka, you ARE a Lady whatever your best efforts to convince me otherwise!" Clearly the man was trying to provoke Asuka into a dialogue intended to stave off her death by the effort required to maintain consciousness and respond on her part; this guy knew his stuff.

"SHINJI IKARI! I told you to meet me at the _border _before we came here to talk, not violate sovereign territory even if it happens to be Belkan! We haven't even properly been introduced yet and you're already disobeying my orders! I guess I should just pose _topless_ instead for any future invitation photos, HUH? Would you listen to me THEN?" This second character, a high-spirited and equally high-strung woman if Shinji was any judge, seemed to be rapidly closing on both his position and the first stranger's; they'd probably collide before stepping in onto the whole macabre scene.

"It's happening again… It's… IT'S ALL HAPPENING AGAIN!" Shinji braced himself as the whole situation triggered the torrent of memories he'd fought to suppress earlier. His mental dam failed utterly and the deluge sprang forth; the pain of memory surging through Shinji's wracked frame. He no longer cared what the total bitch dying before him thought; he was now immersed in his past. In the events that would shape his life forever, even as they had very nearly taken it all the same…

Time: 15:31hrs, 3/14/2005. Location: Airspace northwest of Chopinburg, Federation of Central Usea, Usea Continent on Planet Earth. (Strangereal Universe)

"MOMMY! What's happening now; MOMMY!" The young Shinji Ikari knew even less than usual about what was going on as he screamed against his oxygen mask. _"This… this warm stuff… NO!" _Shinji's eyes confirmed the truth his thoughts fought to deny. Children knew blood on sight, much less touch; and the moon-pale, emerald-eyed brunette scientist he proudly called Mom was slowly bleeding to death right on top of him, her back still painfully hunched in sheltering him from the shrapnel of two nearly missed AIM-9M Sidewinders fired at Air Ixiom Flight 701 on takeoff in an Erusean F/A-18C Hornet's daring intercept attempt. Had the missiles detonated even a meter closer to the aircraft each, the cockpit would've been blown in and the wing sheared off completely; the passengers, defecting scientists from the superweapon project Stonehenge, would all be either dead or dying right now after the crash. To say nothing of the certainty the shrapnel would've had just that bit of extra velocity enough to pierce right through Yui Ikari's frame, surprisingly strong in all senses despite its willowy aspect, and end Shinji's brief time on this Earth.

"Hush, son… The future's… still _so _bright for… you! You'll see…" The only sign of just how gravely Yui Ikari was injured came in her odd pauses. Even through an overhead oxygen mask, her tone carried all the expectant airs of a woman who didn't know the meaning of "giving up," nor cared to. "_Look_ Shinji! It's… Him!" Yui Ikari pointed out the shattered window at the distant silhouette of a lone, haze-blue F-22A Raptor who'd already loosed an AIM-120 AMRAAM now tracking the lone F/A-18C ghoulishly angling for a gun kill behind Flight 702 above. That fighter's summary execution of his former flight lead, the one who'd missed Flt. 701 on takeoff and been assumed a traitor for it, had been enough delay for the wounded Boeing 767 to escape at low altitude. He was now paying the price for his macabre sense of priorities, at the hands of a pilot who'd lost patience with such rank amateurs _long_ ago.

"What's so great about this loser?" If a putative hero couldn't save his mother, then that was enough to disqualify the man in Shinji's mind even if the gods themselves quaked at his sight. "He… He didn't make it in time! HE FAILED YOU; Mommy?"

"No… Shinji." Yui whispered in bemused understanding at her son's incomprehension. "It would take… _far_ more than this… for him to ever disappoint me. Watch him, Shinji!" She clucked in nigh-votive expectation. "Your future is in his hands. And _our _future… all of us… will be in yours when his time is done… my little man!" She knew the end was coming, so she beamingly finished, "And I'll be there, proudly a lady of two champions, when the contest is at hand. You'll see. It… _will… _be alright… my son." With that, the soul known to few but beloved by all of them as Yui Ikari slipped this particular mortal coil; far before her rightful time, evidence itself of yet another universe in dire need of a forcible justice infusion. Stat.

But none of her exhortations could console the poor child clamped to her cold frame in mourning. Naught short of truly mythic powers of the heart could do that. Falling into his young self, the jetliner's airframe echoed with a primal scream of pure loss and surprisingly adult rage. "MAMA!"

Time: 16:55hrs, 4/20/2015. Location: Stier Castle, Principality of Belka, Osea Continent on Planet Earth. (Strangereal Universe)

Shinji Ikari broke from his morbid reverie, having last perceived himself as still crying aboard the wounded Air Ixiom 701, to find the bloodied bathroom empty; its window still gazing out at a lake filled blast crater. "Huh?" was all Shinji could stammer.

The man he'd heard bellowing for the girl, for Asuka if Shinji remembered correctly, stood next to him and whistled. "Got to hand it to you kid. Without your venting, the paramedics and I probably wouldn't have found her in time. You're a real hero today, you hear?" He gave Shinji a pseudo-fatherly smile that struck the boy right off as too much. "The name's Kaji; Ryoji Kaji, but most just call me Blaze."

"NO WAY! I'm no hero. I couldn't even try to save this Asuka of yours myself like a real hero would've; I couldn't even follow simple instructions like Captain Katsuragi's. I don't know whom you're talking about, Mr. Kaji, but it's not me." Shinji decided to get his mea culpa out early so the necessary punishment would be over with soon, _please_.

"Though it pains me to admit it _considering the_ _source_, Kaji is right Shinji. By alerting us and then standing aside for the professionals, you _did _save Asuka's life." Captain Misato Katsuragi's irritation (at least) at Asuka's would-be rescuer Kaji, who she knew only _too _well, showed in her consolation for Shinji despite her best efforts to keep cool. "This whole mess aside, I'm pleased to meet you Shinji." Misato bowed deeply towards him and flicked her sunglasses down as she looked at him just like in the photo she'd sent, with the same cleavage inevitably showing as a result. Shinji barely suppressed a nosebleed at that.

"Hmm. So you've taken to robbing the cradle now, darling? I could serve as well and less perversely, you know." Kaji knew what was coming, but the masochist at heart in him loved to provoke Misato just like so anyway.

"OH STUFF IT!" Misato sounded like she was moving to slap him, but refrained as she slowly walked Shinji out of the castle, Kaji following. "Dating you was both the worst blemish on my life AND distraction from my Academy training. Do you know _how long _it took me to get an AWACS posting at Heierlark just so I could ditch the handle you and your fellow fighter jocks gave me back then?"

"I see. You prefer slaving over a hot radar screen under a guy who calls himself 'Chef' to riding high in a fighter with the name 'Flash' on everybody's lips, eh?" Kaji retorted to his former wingmate and lover with the easy sarcasm of a man who'd accepted such a bizarre decision long ago even if he still didn't understand it.

"_Exactly. _It gives you boorish _men _fewer ideas about my character." Misato thought in triumph for a few seconds, before Shinji's mortified expression and Kaji's cool smile clued her in on the joke and she screamed "AUGH! Let's just get out of here before we turn this innocent into a total degenerate like _you_ Kaji!"

Outside, the paramedics were dealing with two stretchers. One was covered over in respectful preparation for its trip to the morgue, the Lieutanant Colonel's. The other held a restrained and weakly raving Asuka Langley Soryu as she moaned her 'will to die,' as it were to the universe at large. One hoped the ambulance could survive even this weakened tantrum considering her sheer vehemence behind it.

"Such a waste." Kaji intoned regarding the late Belkan officer. "I'd heard of the Red Swallow long before we had reason to meet; many of us trainees thought him the best, barring Mobius One and the Demon Lord of course. And knowing him even as I've come to now, I still don't get it. Why would he do this?"

"The Red Swallow?" Shinji gasped in awe as his knowledge of the man's identity, courtesy of Kensuke's diligent instruction, clicked in a flash. "THAT was Lt. Col Detlef Fleisher; that was Rot One?" The idea of Belka's poster boy ace committing suicide seemed nonsensical. Did war even break knights like him without mercy?

"You knew Detlef Fleisher the History Professor, Kaji." Misato let the earlier acid drain out of her tone as she gently answered Shinji's question in addition to her ex's. "I saw an OBC special once where he was interviewed. Rot One, the pilot, spoke of fighting the Demon Lord over the Round Table on this very day twenty years ago. And yes, Kaji, he sounded every bit a broken man; as if the universe itself had betrayed the values it was supposed to work by when it let the Demon Lord shoot him down. His life so diverted from what he thought it was _meant _to be, suicide was probably the only solution he could see in the end."

"Maybe," Kaji conceded. "But why Asuka? Aside from a crush on me that I can't seem to kill no matter how firmly I try; and yes Misato, I _do _try, whatever you may think of me and however gently I have to do it to avoid future things like… this… I can't see reason enough for her to attempt suicide. Unless… _No…_" Kaji whispered in realization at what probably triggered this whole scenario; such a small yet momentous thing indeed.

"What Kaji?" Misato's voice again took on the character of an old nine-tailed whip as she queried his unspoken mistake. "I see it _is _your fault after all like I thought, so SPEW!"

"I can't tell you here, Misato; in the most serious sense I can mean that. Finish what you came here to meet Shinji for first, then rendezvous with me on this date at this home in Oured…" Kaji slipped Misato a dated note with an address that Misato pocketed after glancing at; it seemed vaguely familiar, so she'd grant his request for the moment. Kaji continued with, "And I'll show you all you need to know."

"Hmm. Okay Kaji, but _any _funny stuff and I'm **gone**, capiche?" Misato wanted the terms of engagement to be absolutely clear this time.

"Crystal, darling…" Kaji assented mistily as his mind wandered back to happier times scarce days ago.

Time: 18:30hrs, 4/18/2015. Location: Office of Professor Detlef Fleisher, History Department, University of Dinsmark, Principality of Belka, Osea Continent on Planet Earth. (Strangereal Universe)

"Thanks SO much, Mr.Fleisher! I can't wait to defend my Thesis, twenty pages on the Albrecht Knights' feud with the Buchners, Zeppelins and Ludwigs in the four-way power struggle over the Principality during our last civil war, against questions from _you personally_!" Asuka Langley Soryu was on the verge of prancing about Professor Detlef Fleisher's office at this news, but restrained herself to merely glomping him instead. "And at your personal suite in _Stier Castle? _This is even better than my class trips to the Waldreich with MissShultheiss back at old Gratia High!"

That having been when Asuka was age nine and still living not far from Sudentor in the small Belkan border town of Gratia with her father and stepmother. Her precociousness had propelled her all the way to Belka's proud University of Dinsmark at age ten, after which she'd found challenge enough to slow her academic pace to one more normal.  
"Yes… Asuka. Miss Soryu. Thank you. It's a pleasure to help you satisfy both your ancestral and academic yearnings at the same time. But… would you please get going home now? I have much… work… to do, and I need time alone for it." Professor Fleisher's tone bespoke a haunting truth behind his front of studiousness, but Asuka naturally didn't care given her current happiness.

"Mm-hm, _ja mein Herr_. See you tomorrow then for the drive down, _Professor _Fleisher!" Asuka closed the great paneled door to his office behind her as she left with her musical farewell. She nearly skipped in joy as she passed her much older classmates on the way out of the University courtyard.

This display mellowed to a more cautious yet still upbeat walk as Asuka proceeded home to the nearby apartment she shared with her guardian, Ryoji Kaji. An odd situation: the last child of a fallen Belkan noble house, and that only by intermarriage of the last male scion to an Anean noblewoman forced from her homeland by Yuktobania's domination thereof, being placed under the care of an ex-Osean Air Defense Force pilot. But one whose… _perks… _struck Asuka as well worth it considering the sheer _manliness_ of that caregiver. _"I just wish he'd see those perks for what they were and take advantage of them. OH! If only…"_ Superficially at least, Asuka's personal maturity was indeed far ahead of her statutory age.

Her ecstatic air could strike an observer as most odd, considering the surroundings at hand. Though the University of Dinsmark itself had survived the Belkan War twenty years ago unscathed, not insignificant tracts of the city still bore signs of the Yuktobanian blockade and diversionary operations that had kept many Belkan forces pinned near Dinsmark in case of an invasion that never came. Bullet holes, from Belkan-issue 7.62mm G3 or 5.56mm G41 rifles; from Yuktobanian 7.62mm AKM or 5.45mm AK-74 automatics, and more besides all remained in many of Dinsmark's more strategic buildings; evidence of raids long past except for their scars. And that didn't even touch the unexploded naval ammunition from the Yuke blockade that was still being found daily in those districts where coastal defenses had been sited. It was a history the young woman who inside called herself Asuka _Zeppelin _Soryu knew all too well, and took pains to remember in every detail so she could avenge the dishonor upon her beloved homeland it implied; someday so at any rate, if her hopes held.

She briefly saw a lean looking man in a leather jacket with a black stocking cap on, standing outside one of Dinsmark's more revered yet humble meeting spots: Pops' Diner. Asuka thought he'd been a fighter pilot once, but wasn't really able to make sure since she didn't talk to strangers; especially not when they had the look of the mean streets as much about them as this one did.

She arrived at her apartment to find Kaji was still gone, as he usually was on whatever hush-hush job General Resource Limited had him working on. Asuka was about to take a shower when she saw something black and squat jutting out from under Kaji's bed. "Mmm… _what is this? _Could it be some sort of delightfully naughty toy he wanted to keep all to himself, or a diary of his most _scandalous_ fantasies (assuredly about ME, of course)? _Wonderful!_" Asuka crept in and examined the hastily concealed object; obviously Kaji would normally have secured it better but haste had seen to otherwise on his part.

Opening the jet-black wooden box, however, proved to be one of the most emotionally devastating mistakes Asuka would ever make; an event comparable to her mother's long madness since a still-unexplained experiment gone wrong in 2004, only ended with her suicide in 2005 right before Asuka's young eyes, in terms of damage wrought to the impressionable young woman's worldview.

She instantly recognized the two unit patches fastened to the underside of the box's top, flanked by two of the silver leaves those accursed Oseans used to indicate Lieutenant Colonel rank. "108th Tactical Fighter Squadron… Wardog… _Osean Air Defense Force…!_" She knew he'd been some kind of OADF pilot before, but _this squadron_? He'd belonged to that band of traitors even to so _lowly_ a nation as Osea? "_Surely Kaji must be playing a prank on me!"_ This denial aside, Asuka's rage was building within even as she fought to suppress it and continue her examination. Pure. Obliterating. Rage.

"And… Razgriz Air Command Squadron… _The Ghosts of RAZGRIZ!_" Asuka screamed that name so loudly she didn't care if the neighbors heard it as she threw the case back under the bed so hard that her only regret was its' not shattering and spilling more bastard Osean medals out.

How could he… Kaji…? How could he have been chief among the worst enemies Belka had known since the war twenty years ago? _HOW? _

Asuka had been across the border in Gratia that dark December 30, 2010 when the combined forces of Osea and Yuktobania saw fit to take a break from pounding each other and visit yet more misfortune on her family's captive hometown of Sudentor; but she'd watched the news broadcasts of the battle against Gründer Industries just like nigh everyone else in Gratia that night.

Oh yes, but where her father had watched with the resigned melancholy of a fallen nobleman and out-to-pasture scientist content to merely get by, and her stepmother Dr. Langley had gazed upon him with the most arrogantly patronizing of airs at her homeland Osea's renewed triumph, Asuka at least had honored the Belkan spirit (her conception of it, anyway) in swearing that night NEVERto forgive those demons of the sky… those _Razgriz…_ for denying her country even such a basic right as _wholeness_, to say nothing of the greater glory it had once possessed.

And to top it all; to crown trespass with insult, as Asuka saw it, that same demon-in-chief known as Razgriz One did naught else but assume care for _her_ immediately after that battle! She had moved to Dinsmark in the Fall Semester of 2011 to attend the University, and met her designated guardian and dream man in Kaji that very same moment. But now the dream had turned to a sickeningly real nightmare as the truth dropped on her like the proverbial bomb.

"I still… love him… but I must also _hate_ him… RIGHT? Why? F it all WHY?" The confusion being too much for her, Asuka grabbed her school uniform and what few other clothes or possessions she didn't feel… _tainted… _by this whole fraudulent life she'd been living the last four years. She departed the flat with a **_SLAM _**of the door that neighbors swore could've been heard all the way over in Oured that night.

Asuka Soryu departed into the night for the one home she could even think of now, her other one: the University. Hopefully, her professor and idol, the former Lieutenant Colonel Detlef 'Rot One' Fleisher, would shelter Asuka and show her the way. _"Yes," _Asuka thought, _"Surely he will!"_

She arrived breathless from running at the staff parking lot to find Professor Fleisher just about to enter his car and cried out for his help. "Mr.Fleisher! Please, I need your help! I… I NEED YOUR HELP OH PLEASE!" She collapsed to her knees as she belted out her latter entreaty.

"Miss Soryu… I thought even _you'd_ be home by now." The former Rot One gave Asuka a mild disapproving look at his recall of her taste for the nightlife, one that might as well have been a gunshot to her heart. "Did our old mutual friend Kaji reject your latest pass at him?" He had at least been compassionate enough to listen to Asuka's endless tales of teenage desire; anything to inject some vitality into what were surely the autumn years of his life at best.

"…_WORSE…_" Asuka hoarsely retorted even as she buried her face in wrists already raw from drying a literal ocean of tears. "…_Razgriz_… The Razgriz… and Wardog! They're both… And _he_ was… AUUGH!" Asuka broke down completely as coherence fled from her before the sheer simplicity and enormity of her guardian's secrets.

Rot One paused for a moment to stare agape at this, his brightest student reduced to prostration on the pavement in a redheaded pile of gibbering hysteria, before silently nodding and placing a hand on her shoulder in consolation. "I see. I understand how…"

"YOU UNDERSTAND NOTHING… you old… _HAS BEEN!_" Fallen so low, there was only one reliable instinct Asuka could turn to at this moment. Lashing out. "You told me _all _about how you couldn't even defeat a mere mercenary like that _stupid _Demon…"

"_Enough!"_ Rot One engaged in one of his very few displays of anger as he shook Asuka's shoulder just hard enough to hopefully snap her out of her tantrum. "You came here for my help. I'd agreed to provide it before you displayed to me just how much of a child you yet remain, Miss Soryu. Get in the car… before I change my mind." He seriously doubted she'd refuse, since in all honesty none of the paths Asuka would walk if she did were any less painful or led anywhere else than the one he had planned.

As at most other times in his life, both as a pilot and a professor, Rot One had been exactly right. "_Ja…_ Professor. Let's go. I'm sick… of this place." Asuka meant that in a about as general a sense Rot One suspected, which she confirmed by trailing as she got in, "I'm… (_I'm sick of this life…_)" The BMW's doors slammed shut curtly, and they were soon headed south on the Belkan _Autobahn_ towards their first and final destination: Stier Castle. There they would each take a room for the night in a private suite Rot One had earned long ago when still an Ace; and then take more… _permanent…_ steps the next morning, all told.

Time: 19:00hrs 4/27/2015 Location: Oured, Osean Federation, Osea Continent on Planet Earth (Strangereal Universe).

Misato Katsuragi walked up to the door of the modest town house in Oured's main suburbs cautiously as Kaji's appointed time arrived. She saw his car there, so he'd at least showed. _"Whatever this is, it had _better _be good or I won't so much as _think _about him ever again, much less see him." _With Shinji at her side making his usual withdrawn glances or dismissive comments, Misato rapped at the door three times.

A kindly looking woman much of Misato's height and wearing a pageboy-style haircut opened the door. A blonde five-year old child was at her right side with one arm around his mother's waist. Her eyes lit up in instant recognition. "Misato?"

"Oh my Gods; Kei!" Misato glomped Kei Nagase as memories of their brief acquaintance back in the OADF academy came rushing back. Nagase had been one of the only other fighter trainees _not _to assign a lascivious meaning to Misato's former callsign of 'Flash.' "What are you _doing _here? I haven't seen you since training because pulling duty on AWACS Chef at Heierlark usually kept me too busy. I even missed you guys when you refueled there after Eaglin. _Gomen nasai… ne?_" Misato slipped back into Anean since she figured it was the only way she could truly express her regret as she folded her hands and bowed in apology, perking her eyes up at '_ne' _to brace for any retaliation on Nagase's part.

"_Daijoubu, Mi-chan!_" Nagase hugged Misato as she assured the woman that her error was inconsequential and led her into the home after removing her shoes with Shinji at the threshold. "I did wonder why you weren't posted to Thunderhead, but felt you got the better deal considering how he turned out." Nagase recalled the gullible AWACS she and her fellows in Wardog Squadron had served under less than five years ago, a forgettable superior if there ever was one.

"Oh _please_, having aspersions cast because of _my own_ callsign is enough! I'd have directed fighters onto anyone who picked up _that _joke within detectable range of me, whatever their IFF." Misato levelly declared so, for she had _zero _patience for that sort of humor in her presence; indeed had only even tolerated it for herself once in her life, a time she fought daily to forget. Remembering herself as she caught Nagase's… priceless expression as her son gazed curiously up at his mother, Misato went into damage control. "Oh… uh… what's your name, son?" Yes! When in doubt, steer the conversation to the kids…

"Albert, ma'am." The blonde boy smiled up at Misato as he answered in that peculiarly beaming tone only very young children could manage, his hair seeming particularly loveably disheveled at that moment. His mom leaned over and pulled him into a hug. Misato had to hand it to Kei; she'd come so far from the withdrawn cadet trying desperately to prove worthy of her family callsign 'Edge' way back when.

"Albert Junior, _darling_. After his father." Nagase tenderly corrected her son first before explaining to Misato and Shinji. "Who _should _be getting home any minute now if he knows what's good for him! By the way, who's _your_ little man if I may ask?"

"Oh! Shinji!" Misato realized just what a rude guest she was indeed being that very moment and called out to correct the problem ASAP. "SHINJI!"

"Wha-what?" Shinji broke from his spacey stare around the room at Misato's harsher than necessary call. He quickly did a double take as he recognized Nagase at once. "Who… YOU? Are you… Miss Nagase? From Air Ixiom 701?"

"One of two, Shinji. I'm not surprised you don't remember more exactly, though." Kei Nagase's elder cousin from San Salvación, also named Kei Nagase and the former 'Edge' from back during the 1999 Usean Coup War, had been First Officer aboard the Boeing 767 that had ferried the defecting Stonehenge scientists and their families from out of Erusea. Her younger relative had been visiting when the defection occurred.

The younger Kei had been the only passenger on that flight who'd been remotely able to console the younger Shinji Ikari after his mother's untimely demise, ironically by sharing her favorite picture book, Ellinor Graun's A Blue Dove for the Princess, with him for a time; long enough at least for the crew to decently cover his mother's body prior to removing it from the plane on landing. That last, however, had undone all of Kei's hard won rapport with the traumatized Shinji, the latter provoked into a berserk tantrum on seeing ISAF medics remove the late Yui Ikari for decent burial that forced them to restrain and sedate him. Looking at Shinji now, Nagase still couldn't believe such a slight looking boy of any age could lash out so violently as she'd seen on that day eleven years ago; it just wasn't natural.

"Right." Shinji intoned strangely, equal parts hope and depression. "I… I think I caught a glimpse of your elder… cousin, right? Of First Officer Nagase as she ordered the wounded Captain taken back into the cabin and the flight attendants tried to see to… to Mom…" Shinji trailed off as he turned all his effort to restrain the traumatic flood of memory threatening to overwhelm his mental defenses so painstakingly built up over eleven bleak years.

Nagase walked over slowly and hugged Shinji in silent consolation, reminding him again precisely why he'd so readily calmed himself for her, and no one else on that flight eleven years ago, way back when. _"She's so much like Mom." _Shinji thought. _"Not the same, for sure; but _so _similar…" _She still had the same effect on him even now as he gradually collected himself. Misato watched downcast as Albert Junior joined in the now-group hug reflexively; Commander Ikari had briefed Misato on his son's psychological profile and what she'd likely have to deal with in her time training him… for what was to come.

"Don't mind me. I'm all for this sort of touchy-feely stuff just like anyone else." Kaji quipped from the couch in the adjacent living room, the television blaring a half-watched football broadcast from November Stadium. He turned his face to the kitchen in anticipation of Misato's likely riposte as he called out "Hey Swordsman, it's salad not Haiku; you know that, right?" Clearly Kaji had gotten used to civilian life.

"Yes sir, I do." The tall black pilot, whose nametags identified him as Captain Snow and looked to be ex-Maritime Defense Force if Misato knew the patches on his flight jacket correctly, responded in characteristic stately fashion to his ex-superior. Which fact Misato found as just more confirmation of how seriously _wrong _this whole universe had to be if Kaji were once superior to _anyone_, much less someone so much more deserving of command as this pilot was. "However, a master takes equal care in all work to which he applies himself; I thought you knew _that _as well, right Blaze?" Swordsman mockingly gazed at Kaji from the kitchen as he continued preparing his chef's salad for tonight's guests, notably including Misato and Shinji.

"Yeah, yeah. I'm always watering my melons the same way too; damn you when you're right Swordsman." That last was delivered in the peculiarly friendly tone only heard between fraternity pledges or similarly close men; such as comrades-in-arms for example."

"I see you're as _cautious _as ever when there are _children _present, eh Kaji?" Misato toned down her reply so as not to sink to her ex's level. She was clearly thinking of Albert Junior more than anyone; but he simply ran off giggling towards his mother Nagase, once again in the kitchen seeing to her part of preparing dinner alongside Captain Snow, wearing that trademark grin of children who've caught an old uncle saying a "bad word" as it were.

The opening door behind both eased and escalated the tension as the man of the house, Osean Broadcasting Corporation anchorman Albert Genette, entered with a willowy male Osean redhead and a bottle-blonde Anean-Osean woman both behind him. Each had a grocery bag for tonight's feast in hand and looked eager to spend an evening with old friends in the new, seemingly peaceful world they'd had no small part in creating. "Honey, I'm home! And I come bearing food; so surely I'm welcome, right?" Genette felt proper anxiety at arriving home so much later than planned, albeit with guests.

"No way! You're lucky I don't kick you out right…" Nagase picked up on the running family joke as she ran to embrace her husband of five years, right before she ground to a halt on seeing yet another friendly face. "Oh my… RITSUKO?" Nagase bunched up her hands in front of her chest ecstatically like the OADF Academy schoolgirl she felt she was once again at that moment.

"Yep. The same, Nagase." Major Ritsuko Akagi, a former medical officer in the Osean Air Defense Force and still at Heierlark Air Base with her… _new _outfit… greeted her old Academy friend with typically clinical aplomb. "I see Misato and Kaji are here too. Perhaps this was all _arranged_." She casually flicked her shoulder-length blonde hair as she stared at her old acquaintance on the couch, which only returned his trademark sheepish grin in admission of guilt.

"Hey, how come I don't get a response like that?" Retired OADF Major Hans 'Archer' Grimm remarked to his old wingmate at her reaction to seeing his fellow guest.

Kaji swiftly nipped this subtle jab in the bud like any of the bandits he'd downed way back when. "Way before your time Archer, I'm afraid. Hell, almost before mine too if I'd joined up a year or two earlier." Kaji remarked on remembering what had still been the high years of his life, all things considered thus far, back at the OADF Academy. "Myself, Majors Nagase and Akagi, and Captain Katsuragi all knew each other back in flight school just before earning our 'butter bars.'"

Ryoji 'Blaze' Kaji, Misato 'Flash' Katsuragi, Kei 'Edge' Nagase, and Ritsuko Akagi had been a nearly inseparable quartet during their training years until just after earning their commissions; abruptly crumbling afterward when Misato sought AWACS work alongside the newly-certified Nurse Akagi at Heierlark AFB after dumping Kaji, and when he in turn accompanied Nagase to advanced fighter training at Sand Island AFB. Breaking the reverie upon having lost all taste for football, Kaji impertinently asked of Nagase, "Chow up yet?"

Nagase's domestic talents again showed themselves in her affirmative reply. Had Kaji's melancholy really taken that long after Archer had shrugged in comprehension at his former superior's answer?

…Dinner had been even more than typically exquisite that night, Kaji recalling his previous visits to his old wingmate's home; a tradition _Nagase _insisted on to keep the old Wardogs together, even if she was married to only the _second _man she'd loved in her life and the vagaries of time, to say nothing of law, prevented the squadron from ever serving again. Kaji had even been able to lay the groundwork for his necessary disclosures tonight, all things considered. _"Friendship, skullduggery, and more besides. Isn't it amazing what one can do in civilized company?"_

After discovering that the Osean-Yuktobanian Circum-Pacific War of 2010 was actually a Belkan-provoked fraud, the 108th 'Wardog' Tactical Fighter Squadron of the Osean Air Defense Force had essentially mutinied, and joined up with the equally rogue Captain Anderson of the aircraft carrier OFS _Kestrel _to escape those who wanted to put the Wardogs down; to keep them from winning the war single handedly before it could be pushed over the nuclear abyss by its Belkan provocateurs. When all was said and done, they'd been left in judicial limbo even considering their subsequent efforts to turn the war against its creators as the legendary Razgriz Air Command Squadron, the aerial bodyguard for President Vincent Harling of the Osean Federation.

It had been all President Harling could do within the Osean Uniform Code of Military Justice to arrange what sentence the Razgriz got instead of the firing squad many harder-line Osean officers _still _felt they deserved: ninety days in the military stockade of Landsford Federal Penitentiary busted to E-1 Airman Basic, followed by a full and secret pardon delivered to the stockade commandant himself from the President's Office.

Thus, even though technically broken for their disobedience, the Wardogs had been gratefully restored all their ranks and honors on release; President Harling having even blackmailed the OADF bureaucracy into granting his ex-guardians a general discharge, with all its neutral connotations, instead of the more usual dishonorable one reserved for their ilk. It was indeed amazing what men could really do to flense the sins of others when threatened by their legitimate Commander-in-Chief with exposure of their own, worse offenses.

"So, Mr. Kaji…" Shinji fumbled with the question of whether he should chance his trust on this man; and he decided to out of sheer boredom if nothing else. "Blaze… you're going to train me as a pilot? For fighters and all, you mean?" Shinji relished the thought of bragging to Kensuke about this as much as anyone else would, naturally. They had discussed it in the backyard after Nagase had gone to put Albert Junior to bed and then clean up the kitchen with Swordsman and Archer. Or rather, Shinji had listened and nodded mutely to Kaji as he'd rambled on not particularly efficiently.

"In a nutshell." Kaji smiled at the boy's quick grasp of things, whatever his inconsistency in applying it. Pops would sure have some work to do before sending this kid to Bartlett, _assuming _he survived the discipline. "You'll be training under 'Pops;' first for your civilian license and then, once you're over eighteen, as an enlistee in the General Resource Defense Force. Once you pass advanced training under 'Heartbreak One' you'll earn your commission, after which you'll have your father to reckon with." Kaji had already surmised there was no way to soften that last for the boy, so he simply left it out there.

"Right…" Shinji hated even the idea of serving under his father; but fortunately as events would later show, he decided after a _long _moment's consideration that he hated missing an opportunity to prove himself to that same father even more. "Pops is that guy again, right? The fat…"

"Whoa now, boy!" Second Lieutenant Peter N. 'Pops' Beagle, as he was now known, sauntered out into the townhouse's fenced backyard. He had met the boy over dinner, coming in late alongside Major Jack 'Heartbreak One' Bartlett. He'd got a sense of how to approach this kid during the dinner conversation sharing old war and friendship stories with his various protégés; very firmly and carefully, if at all. "That's no way to address the man who's going to make a _knight _of you, my young page. Especially not when he's an ace." Pops decided to get the first disclosure Kaji needed making out of the way.

"Bullshit!" Shinji exclaimed incredulously, not caring if Albert Junior improbably heard his swears or not. "You, an ace?" This fatso had palavered on about the _glories _of being a trash hauler for the late Sand Island AFB back when the Wardogs had run the place, surely he jested at somehow being _ace _material indeed.

"That's right, KID; and don't you forget it!" Heartbreak One decided to join them, sliding the glass door aside and prowling out like a caged beast. "Had things gone differently twenty years ago, you'd be addressing him now as _Herr Oberst _Wolfgang Buchner of the Belkan _Luftwaffe_; '_Huckebein _the Raven' himself, and that'd be Colonel to you." Bartlett was already fuming at the probable basket case of a trainee Dr. Ikari had handed him; assuming Shinji survived Pops first. Man oh man…

"Hey now, don't lay it on _that _thick, sir. My station was no reason to talk down to anyone even then, much less now. I was just ribbing the kid a bit while telling him the truth, is all…" Pops had fulfilled the obligations of his former standing in the Belkan nobility, and had expected the commensurate respect due for the same, but never seen fit to use that station to talk down to his theoretical inferiors as so many of his fellows had. Unlike them, he knew fiefs and titles were a sign of Heavenly favor _earned_, not given; blood honored as frequently for its role in bloodshed as anything else. Those same privileges of Estate could just as easily symbolize Heavenly favor _lost_ if abused and subsequently stripped in whatever consequence Fate saw fit, as the circumstances surrounding his departure had shown. "As we all should; _right_ Blaze…?"

"Yep. In our own _time_, of course…" Kaji cautioned against too much revelation; Shinji already knew now that Kaji been Wardog One, and that was enough for the time being. _"Hell, if that Kensuke Aida friend of his is half the gumshoe Shinji claims, the two of them might just figure out the rest without my help."_

"Yeah. I'll opt out before I end up having to kiss anybody, thanks." After all, Heartbreak One did have his Yuktobanian wife of five years, the ever ravishing albeit retired Major Nastasya to consider. Of course, this was hardly Truth or Dare the coterie of former and upcoming fighter pilots had been playing, but _still_.

"Good idea, Heartbreak One." Nagase quipped back, silhouetted in the doorframe with her arms spread across it like the proverbial Lady of the manor opening the gates wide. Misato nodded her approval from behind. Kaji signaled to Nagase and she said, "Pops, Major, Shinji; would you all like some dessert inside?" Albert Jr. had finished his and gone to bed long before for the precise reason that was upcoming. As the three men followed Nagase, Misato stepped out and closed the pane door behind her.

"What is it now, Kaji? This had better not be what it looks like…" Misato steeled herself for the advances she just _smelled _coming even now.

"It is… partially." Kaji reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a jet-black case; still intact despite what looked like impact dents and chips along the façade. "As _Huckebein _said, Misato. The Truth; all I can give you if you won't accept my love. Do with it what you wish." Kaji handed the case over to her downcast, half expecting her to finish what its first assailant had started.

Guardedly, Misato took the case from him and opened it, expecting yet another lewd joke on his part or some such. What she saw was so diametrically opposite that it forced her breath from her lungs at once. "Kaji…?" She knew the Lieutenant Colonel's silver leaves and Wardog Squadron patch at once, as well as the medals Kaji had earned. But the _second _squadron patch stitched to the case's black velvet top was what compelled her incredulity. "So it's true…? What they say in whispers about the connection… The connection between Wardog Squadron on the one hand; and the _Ghosts of Razgriz_ on the other?" Misato looked at Kaji like the most enticing sort of schoolgirl he'd ever seen; one who'd just learned everything they'd _thought _they knew was simply dead wrong, yet was more concerned with learning the real truth instead.

Kaji couldn't help but think admiringly, _"Hope and confusion at once? Welcome to my world, dearest Misato."_ He answered her question simply. "Yes. Wardog _is _Razgriz; in an even stronger sense than the Yukes put it after we sank the _Hrimfaxi_." He thought back to how both their fall and resurrection had begun on dispatching the last remaining Yuke super submarine.

"OH KAJI!" Misato dropped the case roughly to the ground, medals and ribbons spilling every which way as she rushed to embrace this redeemed hero in her eyes. She was roughly stopped short.

"OH STOP IT MISATO!" Kaji forced her arms from him, provoking a crushed yelp from her, then fixed Misato's eyes with his like the proverbial 'death dot' in an aircraft's lead-computing gunsights. "Just _stop it!_ If you're going to do that…" Kaji paused as he leveled his stance and got control of himself. "I want to know if you're doing it because of your father, or because of us; hell because of _me_ gods damn it!" It was a selfish demand, to be true, but Kaji didn't care; he had run out of patience for this psycho-mystical crap Misato had poisoned their first affair with. If indeed he was the reincarnation of her father, the late Dr. Katsuragi lost during a still utterly unexplained experimental expedition to Antarctica on September 13th 2000, then Kaji wanted her to love the living man and not some ghost. She'd hinted at his resemblances to the departed scientist countless times before she'd dumped him, and it hadn't taken much for Kaji to put the pieces together.

"Kaji…" Misato placed her hands over his as he still held her at bay, tenderly invoking his name like some ward against an unspecified coming evil. "_Blaze. _Of course I'm doing it for you. For as long as your blaze of truth lights the darkness in my heart…" Misato directly paraphrased former President Harling's 2013 Farewell Address to the Osean Federal Council as she began to slide her hands up his arms, inching towards an embrace ever haltingly, "My soul, and that of my father within you…" She was taking a _big _risk with that last, but it had to be done; it was how she felt, full stop. "Shall continue down the new path you have lit for the world… _Razgriz One_…" She stopped just in front of his face, her lips beseeching for him to accept repentance of any sins she may once have incurred against him.

Kaji… Blaze did so as he embraced and kissed her. _Deeply_. Nagase watched over her shoulder from the living room contentedly, gently patting her own jet-black medal case as she yet again surrendered her first love unto his true love. It _hurt_, for Kei Nagase was a woman after all; but it was equally _right _all the same, which was why she'd let him leave after confessing to him on their last mission together that bleak New Years' Eve in 2010. Back when Wardog Squadron had stopped at Heierlark earlier during the war, Nagase had learned what she hadn't already known about his breakup with Misato, Ritsuko having typically zero compunction about divulging the gory details.

And after that final mission, when Blaze had told her personally about his plans to work in unspecified capacities with Professor Fleisher at the University of Dinsmark, even to become a foster father to some Belkan noble family's _heiress _if that could be believed, Kei Nagase had realized how pointless competing with her dear old friend Misato would've been. Kaji wanted to help lead the past into the future himself, for his foundling's part at least if not his ex lover's if that still proved unattainable.

So upon regaining her freedom after the short stockade term the Razgriz pilots had been meted out as the minimal concession by President Harling to Osea's remaining hard-liners, Kei Nagase had instead turned to the attentions of Albert Genette, the reporter who'd become as infatuated with her as she'd been with Blaze. The result? A beautiful son who shared Nagase's taste in literature as much as his father's looks, and five years of domestic bliss with a man who'd truly earned his place as her second love.

"Man… I feel like I'm intruding just sitting here." Archer had been something of a wallflower during dinner, when he wasn't the butt of good-natured jokes. He now worked with Swordsman under the retired Captain Anderson from the late OFS _Kestrel_, serving aboard a GRDF research and intelligence vessel.

"Every knight has his lady, Archer; even if she refuses him on all but the day of battle itself." Swordsman reassured his old comrade meditatively. He passed his time as an insurance agent in Oured. "You'll understand soon; assuming all this hush-hush duty we pull doesn't ruin your nightlife, ha!" He couldn't resist a friendly jab at the younger pilot's taste in fashion, alas.

"Indeed. It's almost pathetic how you expect to get a girl with a service routine like _that, _hardly any shore leave and all." Major Ritsuko Akagi, a medical officer in the GRDF soon to be assigned under Commander Gendo Ikari as soon as his commission and unit assignment were in order, remarked at the redheaded pilot's romantic prospects.

"SHH! Honestly, people!" Nagase disciplined her friends carefully. Archer had been right; the peanut gallery had no right but to watch this time, _if _that. Watch as two souls once riven by misunderstanding reunited themselves in truth, and in hope for the world to come should their future efforts succeed…


	4. Training Duel and

Ace Combat Evangelion: Aces' Heritage 

Chapter 4: Training Duel and…

Chapter A/N: Beginning of the storyline proper now that the background is out of the way. The fighters being tested by EVA Squadron have all been modified with the first full versions of the COFFIN system interface as in AC3 _Electrosphere_, which uses all-round camera displays instead of a transparent cockpit and places the pilot in a highly reclined position to resist G-forces, as well as in a neural interface with the aircraft's systems so they can control the plane simply by thought. One disadvantage, though, is that ejection is impossible since the resulting neural trauma would either kill the pilot or render them terminally insane. For an idea of what the Eva kids look like at age 20, the faux Reprise of Evangelion poster around on the Internet gives as good an impression as any.

Warnings: Angst, adult themes, gory violence, strong language and general unpleasantness appropriate to war all ahead.

BGM Alert: _Stamina Rose._ Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex OST1, Track 3. Begins when the dogfight does and continues to its end.

Time: 15:00hrs 4/20/2020: Place: North Osean/South Belkan Priority One Strategic Airspace B7R ("The Round Table"), Osean Federation on the Osea Continent, Planet Earth. (Strangereal Universe)

"Eva Lead?" The radio squawked in Shinji's ears. Or at least it seemed to squawk, despite the fact that in a COFFIN, or Connection For Flight Interface, equipped plane the radio was actually a direct datalink to the pilot's auditory nerves; in-flight telepathy, in other words. "Hey Eva Lead? SHINJI? BUDDY?"

"Huh?" Chief Warrant Officer Shinji Ikari partially broke to answer his wingman from concentration on flying his newly assigned mount, a purple-hulled ADF-01FC Falken II fitted with the second-generation, immersive COFFIN system cockpit; an advance over the simple, 360-degree cameras and armored shell equipped original COFFIN, pioneered by the first ADF-01 Falken way back during the Belkan War of 1995. This flight was yet another hush-hush measurement test evaluating their combat performance with the COFFIN and determining what adjustments might need making.

And since the squad was stopping over at the Osean Air Defense Force's Heierlark AFB for reasons equally above their pay grades, the test scenario was a blind emergency intercept over the infamous Area B7R: The Round Table; monitored by Major Misato Katsuragi, head of Evangelion Squadron aboard the unit's command plane: AWACS Pribnow Box. Shinji thought of how lucky they were last month's test had been a simple night maritime strike simulation as he replied, "Yes 04?"

"Sir, you've got to keep your head on a swivel here; with all due respect. This is the _Round Table_ for Pete's sake!" Shinji's second wingman, Warrant Officer Kensuke Aida, alerted his commander and friend of many years to the dangers of this place, at least as he saw them given his penchant for air combat lore.

A circular crater some 800 kilometers in diameter, this airspace was notorious during the Belkan War as the premier battleground for air superiority. Ostensibly, because of its massive resource deposits and strategic position astride borders formerly claimed by Belka abutting the Republic of Ustio and the Kingdom of Sapin; but really because of precisely the feudal mindset its name implied: a place where any seeking honor as knights of the sky… could duel to claim it. Though long quieter since South Belka's secession to Osea mid-war, ratified by treaty after Belka's defeat, the area was still a favored training ground for rookie fighter pilots from nearby airbases.

However, the airspace quickly took on something of its old aspect when Misato warned Shinji's three-ship flight of their approaching objective. "Warning, Eva Squad, this is Pribnow Box; be advised! Solo bogey closing at 1.5 Mach on an intercept course. Weapons hold; repeat, weapons hold. Strip and identify, over." Major Katsuragi had just authorized an intermediate level of readiness, allowing the weapons to be armed yet not authorizing fire until further information; contrary to popular usage, "bogey" meant "unknown and presumed hostile," as opposed to the confirmed hostility and clearance to fire at will that "bandit" denoted.

"Roger that…" Shinji tensed all over; at least before he remembered that the Falken II tended to misinterpret that and accelerate more choppily than preferred. _"This is it. Here I go, Dad. Try ignoring me once I show you who was really there for Mom that day!"_

"What? I don't…" Kensuke reported the lack of anything on his radar display faithfully enough, but was soon enough proven wrong when his warning gear began positively _screaming_ at him from at least two incoming missiles. While frantically dodging the head-on strike from some 60 degrees above he screamed, "WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT! WHERE THE HELL IS THIS BASTARD COMING FROM??"

The answer to that question only came from Kensuke's simulation gear, the laser ranging pulses and datalink transmissisons that substituted for missile hits firing off a white smoke generator in the Falken's weapons bay. In the space of five measly seconds WO Aida's plane was mock destroyed with an utterly cold efficiency reminiscent of the legendary Demon Lord, former ruler of these skies twenty-five years ago. The battle was now truly joined as Shinji and his other wingman, Warrant Officer Toji Suzuhara in a black-hulled Falken II, split off wildly and just barely dodged the simulated long-range missiles inbound on their aircraft. They were lucky; the attacker had focused on downing Kensuke's silver-hulled Falken II first by lobbing two simulated heat-seekers after him once the first spread of three BVR missiles was outbound.

"Kill confirmed. Eva 04, exit the combat area and RTB." Second Lieutenant Maya Ibuki instructed Kensuke to make way for the surviving members of his flight to finish the test. Grudgingly, with a stream of possibly appropriate invective just barely inaudible beneath his radio buzz, he complied. She then intoned, "All Eva pilots, you are weapons free; repeat, weapons free!"

Shinji's breath caught as he realized the attacker's identity, signaled by her gold-hulled and equally COFFIN-equipped X-02C Wyvern II, once she banked hard past Toji's plane in such a fast merge that both her rivals' planes were buffeted by the jet wash from her supercruising at Mach 1.5; even some miles distant. _"A-A…Ayanami!"_ Shinji's stomach sank right at that thought. It wasn't fair! It just wasn't fair!

Chief Warrant Officer Rei Ayanami. The stunning blue-haired, ghost pale woman with the crimson eyes; Shinji's comrade-in-arms these past five years of training as a GRDF fighter pilot, and the clear favorite of his father: Special Air Division NERV CO Commander Gendo Ikari. Every time he looked at her, equal parts dumbstruck awe and juvenile longing, Shinji swore unto his inevitable grave Rei was the spectral, spitting image of his late mother Yui Ikari; despite the universal ridicule his friends heaped on the idea. That is, equally as much as they ridiculed his obvious desire for her since she'd hardly spoken five _short _paragraphs to him in all their five long years of acquaintance. He truly had his work cut out for him since he'd seen her fly before, albeit never against him: beautifully enough to make one cry, full stop.

Nonetheless, as much as Shinji hated the idea of fighting this vision, he hated the idea of _losing_ to her… to anyone, still more. Therefore, he ordered Toji to break right and attempt either a conversion turn onto Rei's tail or a one-circle fight from head on against her, Shinji calculating on Rei to evade and open her tail to his sights. Either of Toji's options was arguably as dangerous as the other, since Rei was known for both double-tapping her missile shots and pulling either Pugachev's Cobra or similar hard braking maneuvers in such instances; those latter maneuvers intended to cause her pursuer to overshoot either right into her waiting missile lock or behind for Rei to make her own joust-style pass. _None_ who overshot Rei survived the blunder, even if all her dogfights thus far had been training mockups.

Shinji's order had swiftly been proven an error, however; not a good omen for when he'd be entrusted with formal flight leadership as a Second Lieutenant, if ever. Rei had taken the brash Suzuhara up on his offer of a joust and squarely whacked him in teeth, as it were; one simulated missile impacting as the second went wide because of the extreme banking angles involved. Thus disoriented as his plane bucked to simulate damage, Suzuhara faltered in his normally quite good flying technique just long enough for Rei to pull an inhumanly tight vertical conversion turn onto his tail and hold him dead in her sights long enough to simulate a gun kill. Apparently, despite her mask of emotionlessness, Rei Ayanami sure believed in adding proverbial insult to injury when it came to putting those opposing her in their place.

Gulping as he watched Toji's plane belch smoke from its belly canister and break off to return home per Maya's usual commands, Shinji thought frantically, _"I mustn't run away… I mustn't run away… I MUSTN'T RUN AWAY!!" _He punched the throttle to afterburner as he began to consider his alternatives in a pseudo-head-on approach like currently so against Rei, none of them good.

Option 1: He could attack her truly head on, hoping against reason that her targeting system hadn't reloaded her simulated missiles yet, and still more to dodge said missiles even if they were fired. A surprisingly effective tactic nowadays, what with all-aspect missiles, largely _because _it was the most foolish thing one could do and thus normally unexpected short of beyond-visual-range fighting. But again, risk normally outweighed reward here, especially so against a pilot of Rei's obvious mettle; and Shinji guessed from Toji's mock demise that he would hardly fare any better using it than his friend had.

Option 2: He could blow past her and attempt an Immelman or Split-S, each being opposite the other, or another conversion turn in an attempt to somehow drop onto her tail. Again, this general approach too was scarcely better than Option 1 because of Rei's tendency to force pursuers into overshooting her to their inevitable simulated doom. Shinji quickly eliminated either the Immelman or Split-S in this case, since leaving his intakes and tailpipes exposed even as briefly as those maneuvers did was simply out of the question here. That left the conversion turn. _"Here… HERE I GO!!"_

Shinji broke hard left immediately after cracking the Mach in too close a merge to realistically shoot, despite just barely guessing correctly that Rei's targeting system still hadn't reloaded after downing Toji, and grunted against the G-forces as he wrenched his Falken II as hard as its' forward-swept wings, fly-by-light controls and thrust-vectoring engines would allow in pursuit of Rei's Wyvern II. A close pursuit was hardly the Falken's advantage against a Wyvern, but Shinji was too close to reasonably employ his medium-range missiles and thus had to settle for the relatively least-_disadvantageous _of several close-range tactics available.

Predictably, Rei began to barrel roll upwards after lighting her afterburners, forcing Shinji to either follow her in the worst sort of fight possible: a Vertical Scissors, or else risk the same demise that befell Kensuke if he let her arc away for another BVR pass. In the sort of mad turning and rolling that characterized this fight, an aerial 'knife fight' if there was any such thing, one aircraft must eventually attempt to break the cycle of progressively tighter turns to its advantage or else overshoot. Assuming it didn't just stall out first. _"Damn! What's the deal with this rigged system check anyway? I know we're not stunt pilots… but this is INSANE!" _Despite his thoughts' hesitance, Shinji knew he had no choice and followed. He wasn't yet aware enough of his surroundings to see Rei coming in time and avoid getting smacked like Kensuke if he tried to separate to longer range.

The g-forces built steadily, and time blurred more with each passing second/age as Shinji tried to wrestle Rei into a solid missile lock, then into his gunsights when that became impractical. And the speed just kept dropping along with the range: 400 knots… 300… 250. _"Th-this is it… I'm going to stall, and she'll just stall out afterward to whip her nose down towards me and fire…NO!!!"_

With his speed at a mere 205 knots, Shinji made his gamble, pulling a hard loop _opposite _Rei's after she seemed to commit to that particular roll. It worked: she was now flying perpendicular to him at only slightly higher speed; a perfect simulated gun target. _"YES! Come on girl… let's just get this over with so…? _Shinji paused inside as he kept angling for the shot, blushing as he realized what he wanted to finish this fight for: so he could fantasize about her more back on the ground. No doubt about it: he was a pathetic loser… even, hell, _especially_ to himself.

Be that as it may, the success of his approach in this case shocked him back to reality as Misato herself chimed, "WHOO YEAH! Gun kill confirmed! Way to go Shinji!!" She caught herself after chuckling a bit before continuing, "Well done both of you. RTB for debriefing and some well-earned rest kids." Misato seemed just a hair too eager at the result of Shinji's sweat and anxiety today; had she been drinking too much of her 'special' coffee again?

The return flight to Heierlark had been equal parts easy flight and difficult silence for Shinji as he puzzled out why he'd managed to defeat Rei today. But gradually, he began to sense the outline of an answer. _"She's so perfect; in… hell EVERYTHING. But maybe that's the problem? She stayed committed to that turn even though she didn't have to. Does she really know how to improvise?" _Shinji wondered. Rei's flying technique certainly covered the book, but maybe that was all. He hadn't sensed her particularly taking notice of him, Toji or Kensuke outside the minimum required to maintain situational awareness… precision without passion, perhaps? In any case, it had been effective enough this day, Rei still coming in 2:1 in her favor thanks to downing Shinji's wingmen first.

As Maya signaled they could begin landing in formation, Rei finally deigned to acknowledge Shinji's presence scarce meters to starboard of her as they finished lining up on the ILS localizer bar, forming the vertical part of a crosshairs in each of their Head-Up Displays. "Ikari?"

"Wha-what? Ayanami?" Shinji nearly choked in amazement, as he always did when she asked of him.

"You performed well today." Had something come over her? Since when did she complement _anybody_; much less Shinji?

"Uh… well… it was nothing. Really. I was just, you know…" The range was dwindling, and the awkwardness of the moment was hardly aided by Shinji's need to keep his approach and glide slope both on target, thus displaying an equilateral cross on his HUD for reference. If Rei was having the same problem, her plane's usual silken glide certainly betrayed no sign of such.

"No, Ikari. I do not know." She was demanding an answer. Damn it all, she wasn't letting Shinji off the hook now!

"I was… I WAS JUST DOING WHAT EVERYONE ELSE EXPECTS OF ME!!" Shinji faux-screamed over the secure link between his purple Falken's COFFIN and the gold Wyvern's. He wanted to get the uncomfortable truth out as fast as possible.

Rei only returned with a flat question, "I see. Do you not admire what your father has done for you… for the world?" Her question punctuated their tires hitting the runway on another textbook landing for both of them.

"WHAT??" Shinji had hardly imagined Rei, to his mind a guardian angel assuming he had such, could ever offend him; but she just had, and gravely so at that. "How in _hell _could I admire what that jerk has done? Do you even know who he is, Rei?" Shinji needed to gauge just how crazy his fantasy girl could possibly be, however disheartening the results.

"Yes. Shinji. Do you?" Each word of Rei's terse and quiet rebuttal struck Shinji like lashes from a barbed whip. As they taxied in to their revetments on the flight ramp, Shinji moped in stunned regret at how he'd probably sunk forever whatever slim chances he had of a deeper relationship with Rei. His friends would be _guffawing _at the news when they inevitably forced him to fess up; especially Toji and his girlfriend Hikari Horaki, the last pilot selected for EVA Squadron, which relationship Major Katsuragi only seemed to allow because they were both Warrant Officers and thus presented no formal reason to order a separation. In any case, Misato never assigned them to the same flight, so she clearly took pains to ensure discipline where it mattered: in the air.

Stepping into the debriefing room after changing into his service blues and flight jacket, in which room Misato was loitering with her usual casualness, her face plastered with an even bigger smile than usual for her excitable self as she eyed him intently, Shinji moped further as he endured her equally greatly _annoyed_ recounting of the day's fight. "At 15:00 hours today, the First Flight of Evangelion Squadron, Special Air Division NERV of the GRDF engaged a lone bogey over Area B7R. This mission was actually a surprise many-on-one training engagement between three Eva Squad ADF-01FC Falken IIs, under the command of Chief Warrant Officer Shinji Ikari, and one Eva Squad X-02C Wyvern II piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Rei Ayanami. Suffice it to say that I am _shocked _at how poorly Warrant Officers Suzuhara and Aida performed today!"

Misato shot them her characteristic 'annoyed scowl' before continuing as they winced at such disapproval from their shared fantasy woman. "Rei is our pilot with the lowest synchronization with her COFFIN system, and this test was actually intended to challenge her so her stats could improve. But you two were off the ball and merely ended up as meat for her, since she was explicitly told _not _to hold back. Only Shinji here," Misato winked his way in what seemed only barely professional regard, "fulfilled the point of this mission; providing Rei with an effective challenge in both tactics and piloting before shooting her down in the simulation.

For which, if you shall all stand gentlemen," Misato reached into her GRDF uniform overcoat, seemingly a strange thing to wear for a debriefing indoors until she pulled out two small golden bars and a velvet box. "I hereby honor Chief Warrant Officer Shinji Ikari, by the power vested in me under the General Resources Defense Force Charter as commander of Evangelion Squadron, with a field commission to the rank of Second Lieutenant; with all the privileges and responsibilities pertaining to said rank. Approach, Chief Warrant Officer Ikari."

Shinji hesitantly stood before Major Katsuragi as she stood and pinned the two golden 'butter bars' to his uniform lapels. She then handed him the velvet box, which he opened to see contained the other two for his shoulder straps, presumably to be pinned on later. He hesitantly saluted her in silent thanks. She replied, "Congratulations, Shinji," as she returned his salute.

His comrades did the same, disappointed scowls on their faces as they realized they'd missed out on promotions to CWO at least today. Rei simply saluted, paying him no more heed than usual. Though he could understand why, it still _hurt _as far as Shinji was concerned. Deeply.

"Dismissed. Shinji, if you may, I have some further matters to discuss with you." Misato's beaming tone audibly drained from her voice as she spoke. Clearly her praise wasn't unqualified after all. Typical, at least for Shinji's life that is.

But what followed next was most _atypical_, at least for the moment. Commander Ikari's "audio only" monolith replaced the fig-leaf emblem of the Special Air Division NERV on the briefing screen, and delivered the news. "Attention. There is word of a lone aircraft, ADFX-01 Morgan class, approaching this base. Our radar analysis has already confirmed it is carrying Multi-Purpose Burst Missile ordnance, and we can only presume its objective is to destroy this facility. The Osean Air Defense Force planes guarding the perimeter have already been shot down, so it is our responsibility to return the favor. EVA Squad is to launch all ready aircraft at once and intercept."

Misato blew up. "Sir, that's crazy! Two of my pilots are in NO way prepared for combat, and one is clearly showing signs of mental fatigue after her COFFIN synchronization test today!" She referred to Rei, sitting blankly in what looked like her conserving energy as much as possible.

"I neither make nor expect excuses, Major Katsuragi. You shall carry out your orders however you must; that is all." Commander Ikari's monolith vanished, in favor of the fig leaf and "God's in His Heaven, all's right with the World" motto once again.

"Damn it!" Misato stomped the floor once, HARD, and fumed visibly for a moment. Then she turned morosely to Shinji and asked what her duty required. "Shinji?"

He saw no other point. He'd tried to run away a year ago, after nearly panicking when Rei had been badly injured in a crash by her Hawk trainer jet shortly after its issue to her. All that had earned Shinji was some time in the stockade and yet more disapproval from his hated father. And yet more questioning, vaguely chastising stares from a bloody, bandaged, but unbowed Rei as well. "I'll do it." His tone was pure resignation, and no more.

"Good, Shinji." Misato's pacing in that statement made him doubt a pause between those words had really been intended; it was only barely audible if it indeed existed. "The techs are arming your Falken now with XLAA long range missiles and a full load of Sidewinders. Good luck." She really meant it; his five years of living with her and Kaji had certainly brought out the maternal side in her, it seemed.

Raising his head blankly, Shinji ambled towards the locker room for his flight suit; the second time that morning he'd done so. Would it always be like this? Would he always be caught up short by the problems of strangers he'd prefer _never _to meet and inflict himself upon? He wondered as he began to strip down before slipping into his G-suit…


End file.
